Why Camden Vetoed a Locker System

LOS ANGELES—Camden Property Trust made national headlines last month when they announced the decision to nix package delivery service at their properties. According to Luxer One, a package locker delivery service designed to solve the package problem for multifamily owners, Camden had been negotiating a locker system solution with the company for years before deciding to forego package service from their properties completely and have carriers deliver packages directly to residents' doors.

"We know the folks over at Camden, and we have been talking to them for several years to find a solution, whether it be our Luxer Room product or our Luxer Lockers, our Luxer Room product being a lower monthly price," Arik Levy, CEO of Luxer One, tells GlobeSt.com during an exclusive interview at RealShare Apartments. "We had been trying to find a solution for them and their strategy is that they don't want to handle packages and they don't want to pay for it."

Camden Properties Trust, however, said that the decision was about space more than cost. "Today at most of our garden-style communities, which have 350 units, we are receiving 40 to 50 packages a day," Kristy Simonette, chief information officer and SVP of strategic services at Camden Properties Trust, tells GlobeSt.com. "We don't have the room physically to store them and it becomes this huge disruption. While package lockers looked like they may be a good solution for us, the reality is that we don't have the room to install these lockers. It was problematic for us because if we did put them somewhere, it would likely take up a parking place or another area that the community wasn't built for."

While the two disagree about the solution, they both agree that packages deliveries are growing exponentially at apartment communities. Today, Camden says that they receive 40 to 50 packages a day at each of their multifamily homes. They actually implemented a tracking system five years ago and found that residents take three-to-four days to pick up a package. From Camden's perspective, this exacerbated the problem. "We have a huge backlog, and we felt that we would need more package lockers than you would apartment homes," says Simonette. "We are in the apartment business, we are not in logistics. That was really why we decided not to go down the package locker route. We don't think it is scalable for us. The people that can solve this are the logistics experts." Luxer One, however, conducted similar researcher, and found that 50% of all packages delivered are picked up within six hours.

Camden's decision incited a media frenzy and several residents interviewed by media outlets said that they wouldn't renew their leases because of the policy change. "If 50% of your residents are using an amenity and you take it away or it isn't available, it is going to have a direct impact," says Levy. "I don't think they expected the blowback that they received, and from what I have heard from the other firms, most people are saying that was a bad decision and they are going to solve this problem."

Camden, though, says that the blowback hasn't been all that significant, and that they haven't seen a meaningful change in tenancy. "This has pretty much been a non-event," says Simonette. "We have had a few unhappy residents, because you always have that any time you make a policy change, but it hasn't been as big of a story with our residents as it has with the media. We don't have any evidence that this has impacted our leasing ability or our renewal percentage." The policy change was implemented slowly starting late last year, and is now in effect at all of Camden's properties.  

Camden was losing an estimated $3 million a year in costs related to the package delivery service, but Levy says that cost could have been dramatically curbed with a locker system. "I think the fall out that they are going to see from losing residents or not attracting residents is going to be way more than $3 million," he says. "If they had put in our systems across our entire portfolio, it would have cost them less than $3 million." Many property owners agree, he says, saying that the number of inquiries that he has received has gone up significantly since the announcement.

Costs aside, Simonette says that Camden believes having packages directly delivered to the resident's doorstep is a better solution and a better service for residents, who would otherwise not be able to retrieve their packages from 9AM to 6PM. "This is really what people want, and we have had conversations with Amazon, and this is what Amazon wants," she says. "We have become this middle-man bottle neck. We think this is a better solution, and a better service."