Package Lockers Have Become a Real Amenity in Multi-Family. Here’s What to Know.

Americans averaged over 70 shipped packages per person in 2025, and multi-family properties are bearing the operational weight. Smart package lockers — led by Luxer One, now part of ASSA ABLOY — have matured into a genuine resident amenity that recovers staff time, eliminates porch piracy, and measurably improves resident satisfaction. Here’s how the category works, what it costs, and what to think about before deploying.

The package problem is bigger than it gets credit for

If you manage multi-family property, you already know this story. The volume of resident packages has grown every year for over a decade. Online shopping, subscription boxes, grocery delivery, returns going back out — the door of every apartment building has become a logistics intake point that no one designed it to be.

The scale of it surprises people who haven’t run the numbers. Americans averaged over 70 shipped packages per person in 2025, with the trend continuing to climb. For a 200-resident community, that’s roughly 14,000 inbound packages a year. For a 400-resident community, closer to 28,000. The leasing office staff who used to handle packages as a small courtesy task now spend meaningful portions of their day on package logistics — accepting deliveries, notifying residents, locating misdelivered items, dealing with carriers, handling complaints.

Property managers cited package theft as a top-three safety concern in industry surveys. Residents move out and cite package issues in their exit feedback. Leasing prospects tour properties and judge the mail room as a signal of overall property operations. The category isn’t a back-office issue anymore. It’s a resident-experience issue with retention implications.

The bad operational options:

• Leasing office accepts everything. Staff time drain, lobby congestion, package accumulation, lost packages, weekend coverage gaps.
• Doorstep delivery to unit doors. Porch piracy, weather damage, missed deliveries when residents aren’t home for signed packages.
• Pile-in-the-mailroom approach. Theft from other residents, misidentification, packages stacking up indefinitely when residents are traveling.

None of these scale to the package volumes residents now generate. The category that does scale is smart package lockers.

How smart package lockers actually work

The model is straightforward enough that it can be described in a few sentences. A bank of secure lockers sits in an accessible location at the property — usually near the lobby, mail area, or main entrance. The lockers come in multiple compartment sizes to accommodate everything from envelopes to oversized boxes.

When a package arrives, the carrier — UPS, FedEx, USPS, Amazon, DHL, or any of the dozens of last-mile delivery services that now operate — scans the package and uses the locker system’s interface to identify the resident. The system selects an appropriate-sized compartment, opens it, the carrier places the package inside, and the compartment locks automatically. The resident receives an immediate notification (text and/or email) with a unique access code or app credential to retrieve the package at their convenience, 24/7.

Retrieval takes seconds. The resident enters their code or uses the app, the compartment opens, they take their package, and the locker resets for the next delivery.

The leading platform in the multi-family category is Luxer One, which was named the multi-family industry’s market leader in package lockers in a 2018 report by the National Multifamily Housing Council and Kingsley Research. Luxer One was acquired by ASSA ABLOY in 2018 and continues to operate as the dominant player in this space, with a product portfolio that has expanded significantly under ASSA ABLOY ownership to include refrigerated lockers for grocery delivery, package rooms (a different form factor that converts an existing closet or alcove into a smart-locker-protected space), smart office lockers, and integration into the broader ASSA ABLOY multi-family access ecosystem.

Other platforms exist in this category — Parcel Pending (acquired by Quadient), Package Concierge, Position Imaging, and others — and the right choice depends on specifics of the property. Luxer One’s combination of market share, ASSA ABLOY backing, and integration with the wider multi-family access stack has made it the default consideration in most evaluations we participate in.

The operational case

The case for smart package lockers in multi-family rests on several distinct value streams that add up to a strong return on investment for most properties above a certain size.

1. Staff time recovery. The most direct and quantifiable benefit. Front office staff stop spending time on package logistics. The hours per week that go back to leasing, retention, and resident engagement work are operationally significant. Across a year, the recovered staff time can translate to one to two FTE equivalents on properties of substantial size.
2. Package security. Lockers eliminate the porch piracy problem and the mail room theft problem in one move. Packages are in a secured compartment from the moment the carrier closes the door until the resident retrieves them. The chain of custody is logged.
3. Resident satisfaction. Residents consistently rate package lockers as one of the highest-impact amenities they encounter in multi-family properties. The 24/7 availability matters — residents pick up packages on their schedule, not the leasing office’s. The notification immediacy matters — residents know within minutes when a package has arrived, not the next day when they happen to walk past the leasing office.
4. Carrier acceptance. Most lockers integrate with the major carriers (UPS, FedEx, USPS, Amazon) at a level that makes carrier delivery friction low. Carriers know how to use the system, the locker handles routine deliveries efficiently, and the carriers themselves benefit from not having to find individual residents or leave packages exposed.
5. Retention impact. Resident retention is one of the most expensive things to lose in multi-family. The cost of turning over a unit — make-ready, vacancy loss, leasing costs, concessions — runs thousands of dollars. If a smart package locker measurably contributes to retention, even at modest levels, the system pays for itself quickly.
6. Leasing differentiation. Properties touring prospects increasingly find that smart package lockers are an expected feature in newer construction and Class A properties. Their absence is noticed by prospects who have lived elsewhere with them. The amenity is becoming table stakes for competitive positioning in many markets.

What it actually costs

Honest pricing in this category varies considerably with property size, configuration, and feature set, but some reasonable framing:

• Hardware. A locker system sized for a 200-unit property typically falls in the range of tens of thousands of dollars for the locker bank itself, depending on capacity, finish, indoor vs outdoor rating, and the specific configuration. Larger properties scale up; very small properties (under ~50 units) often have a hard time justifying the capital expense without going to a package room configuration instead.
• Software and service subscription. Smart locker platforms operate on a SaaS model. Expect monthly subscription costs tied to property size and feature tier. The subscription typically includes the management software, the resident app, carrier integration, customer support, and ongoing platform updates.
• Installation and electrical. Indoor installations are simpler than outdoor; outdoor installations need power, network connectivity, weather protection, and lighting considerations. Installation costs vary accordingly.
• Total economics. The relevant number to look at is total annual cost versus the staff time recovered, plus the harder-to-quantify benefits in retention, resident satisfaction, and leasing differentiation. For most properties above 100 units, the ROI conversation is straightforward. Smaller properties need to evaluate more carefully whether the per-unit economics work.

Decisions worth getting right before deployment

If you’re a multi-family owner, asset manager, or developer evaluating package lockers, several decisions affect whether the deployment delivers the value it should:

1. Location matters. The lockers need to be in a location residents pass naturally — near the main entrance, the mail area, or a high-traffic common area. Lockers tucked into a low-traffic corner of the property get used but generate complaints. Carriers also need to access the location easily during delivery hours.
2. Sizing matters. A locker system sized too small fills up during peak periods (especially holidays and back-to-school) and becomes a source of complaints rather than a solution. A system sized too large takes up real estate that could have been used for other amenities. Most platforms have sizing calculators based on resident count and package volume; use them.
3. Outdoor vs indoor. Outdoor lockers offer 24/7 carrier access without depending on building entry, but require weatherproofing, lighting, and outdoor power/network. Indoor lockers are operationally simpler but require carrier access during specific hours unless the building entry can be coordinated.
4. Package rooms as an alternative. Some properties don’t have the space, capital, or volume to justify a full locker deployment but still want a better solution than the leasing office. Smart package rooms — converting a small dedicated room into a camera-monitored, access-controlled space where carriers deliver and residents pick up via app — can be the right intermediate solution for properties that don’t fit the locker model.
5. Integration with your property management software. Most leading platforms integrate with Yardi, Entrata, RealPage, and AppFolio at varying depths. Resident move-in/move-out flows, automatic account creation, lease status updates — all of these matter to whether the system runs smoothly or generates ongoing administrative work. Verify the specific integration before procurement.
6. Carrier ecosystem. The dominant carriers in your market should all have established workflows with the platform you’re considering. UPS, FedEx, USPS, and Amazon are table stakes. Newer last-mile delivery services that are growing in specific markets are worth asking about.
7. Refrigerated locker option. Grocery delivery is one of the fastest-growing categories of multi-family delivery, and refrigerated locker compartments — which keep perishables at safe temperatures until pickup — are an increasingly relevant feature in higher-end properties. Whether you need this now depends on your resident demographic; whether the platform supports it for future expansion is worth confirming.

Why the ASSA ABLOY connection matters operationally

Luxer One’s acquisition by ASSA ABLOY in 2018 has produced practical benefits worth noting for multi-family owners thinking strategically about their access stack.

ASSA ABLOY’s broader portfolio in multi-family includes the ACCENTRA access management platform, the Yale and SMARTair wireless lock ecosystems, and a wide range of door hardware and entry systems. Luxer One’s increasing integration with that broader stack means that the package locker system isn’t a standalone island — it can connect to the property’s overall access control, resident credentialing, and operational workflows in ways that standalone locker products cannot.

For owners standardizing on an ASSA ABLOY-based access ecosystem (or seriously evaluating one), Luxer One becomes a natural extension. For owners going with Allegion’s Schlage XE360 / Control ecosystem, Luxer One still works — the platform is sold to many properties regardless of what’s on their resident unit doors — but the integration depth is different.

This is the kind of consideration that often gets missed during procurement. The package locker is selected by one team, the access control system by another, the property management software by a third. The owner who thinks across these systems — and standardizes the ecosystem decisions deliberately — ends up with a more cohesive operation than the owner who treats each procurement as standalone.

How we help

We work with multi-family owners and developers on package management solutions as part of broader access control and resident experience deployments. The right answer depends on the property — size, layout, resident demographic, existing systems, budget, and the operational maturity of the management team.

Our typical engagement starts with the question of what the property actually needs. Sometimes a full locker deployment is the right answer. Sometimes a package room is the better fit. Sometimes the right first move is fixing the leasing office workflow before any technology investment. The honest assessment is more valuable to the owner than a default pitch toward the highest-revenue option.

If you operate multi-family property and you’re thinking about package management — for a new build, a renovation, or an upgrade to an existing property — send a message. The conversation about what fits your property is genuinely different from the generic vendor pitch, and the decisions made up front determine the operational reality your residents and staff live with every day.