Late last week Camden Property Trust decided to stop accepting resident packages across its 167 property portfolio. The company estimates it takes 10 minutes of work time to handle a single package, causing about a 3.3 million in annual losses.

When I first learned about Camden’s decision I felt let down, both as someone in the industry and as a renter myself. Handling packages for residents is one of the last courtesies we offer our residents and it’s disheartening to see such a big operator stop offering the service. I certainly can appreciate the company’s concern about the rise in package handling but, the decision does feel a bit like an overreaction. I question whether all 167 properties needed this new policy or if there were maybe a few the company could have saved. The fact is, residents that are no longer able to pick up packages at the clubhouse are left to fend for themselves, possibly opening up their communities to increased theft and overall poor customer experiences.

It feels like we, as an industry, need a moment to re-calibrate our views on resident relations.

Property Management Memes is a Facebook Page with just under 20,000 subscribers where people in the apartment industry post their work experiences in “meme” form. When you look at Property Management Memes and the many, many other similar online communities, it’s hard to ignore the feeling of contempt staring back at you.

Most of these posts are expressing anger and frustration about, well, their residents’ anger and frustration. This makes me question whether on-site teams are unhappy with their residents or with the not-so-resident-friendly policies the on-site teams often have to enforce. Is this misplaced anger, in turn, trickling up the totem pole, resulting in more decisions that affect our ability to provide good customer service? We need meaningful solutions that focus on building stronger resident relations, otherwise no one is happy.

Where’s the technology?

The package handling issue, and quite frankly, our tendency to create policies that put our residents in a jam, seems to be a part of a larger issue related to our inability to leverage technology as a meaningful solution. I can’t help but wonder if the 10 minutes per package statistic provided by Camden could have been reduced by creating a logistical plan of attack that leveraged a package logging software.

Our technology Achilles heel isn’t exclusive to package handling, it is something that affects many other facets of our business. A recent post on TechCrunch revealed that 78% of residents prefer to pay their rent online but only 30% are actually doing so. I suspect this has to do with the absorbent fees associated with paying rent online and the lack of online payment access. Even though this problem has been around for years, it seems the Multifamily Industry has done little more than create policies and procedures that restrict how and where residents can pay their rent. These shortcomings would seem downright crazy to anyone who just bought a month’s worth of ramen noodles online with free same day delivery, using little more than their phone and fingerprint. A package that today would not be accepted by the clubhouse for many residents. We need to catch up to our residents or our residents will find somewhere else to live.