ETI Blog

Why the Package Room Quietly Became the Building's Hardest-Working Space

Ask any multifamily developer what the most important amenity in their building is, and you will probably hear about the rooftop deck, the fitness room, the lounge, or the pool. Those are the spaces that get the renderings, the marketing budget, and the broker tours.

Now ask which amenity their residents actually use the most. The honest answer is rarely on that list.

It is the package room.

The Data Behind the Claim

The numbers tell the story. The average apartment resident in 2026 receives more than 60 packages a year. That is more than one delivery per resident per week. Across a 200-unit building, that adds up to roughly 12,000 packages a year passing through one space.

By comparison, a strong fitness center in the same building might see 40 to 60 percent of residents using it with any regularity. The rooftop deck pulls real numbers for three or four months out of the year. The lounge might serve a few events and a small group of regular work-from-home users.

The package room serves everybody, every week. There is no other space in the building with the same throughput.

The 2024 NMHC and Grace Hill Renter Preferences Survey, which covers more than 172,000 residents across 4,200 communities, ranks smart lockers as the second most-valued amenity in apartment buildings, right behind secure parking. Package theft cost multifamily properties roughly $12 billion in 2024. With e-commerce projected to hit twenty percent of all retail sales in 2026 and still climbing, the volume is only going up.

How the Package Room Got Here

The package room used to be a back-of-house space. A locked closet behind the leasing office, sometimes a corner of the mailroom, sometimes just a bench by the front desk. It was administrative, not amenity. Property managers did not market it. Developers did not budget for it.

Then Amazon scaled. Then Instacart, Walmart Plus, DoorDash, Uber Eats, and a dozen other delivery services. Then refrigerated grocery delivery. Then prescription medication delivery. The volume of packages flowing through a multifamily building turned from a trickle into a flood in about ten years.

Operators responded with three generations of solutions. The first generation was the manual package room with staff handling intake at the front desk. That broke down quickly as volume scaled, with front desk teams reporting they were spending hours every day on package logistics. The second generation was the open self-pickup package room, which produced theft incidents and chaos. The third generation, where most new buildings are landing now, is smart lockers and managed smart package rooms with secure self-service, app notifications, and refrigerated capacity for groceries and medications.

What a Good Package Room Looks Like in 2026

A package room serving a 200-unit building should be sized for surge volume, not average. That means roughly one locker compartment for every 1.5 to 2 units, with a mix of compartment sizes. Roughly 60 percent small, 25 percent medium, 15 percent large is a working starting point.

Refrigerated capacity matters more than it used to. With grocery delivery and prescription medications both growing, buildings without any refrigerated locker capacity are losing leases to buildings that have it. Even a small refrigerated section serving five percent of total locker count moves the conversation forward.

The space needs proper lighting, climate control (packages sit there for hours), good ventilation, and access during off-hours for residents who work irregular schedules. It needs a clear pathway from the building entrance that delivery drivers can find without help. Camera coverage that ties into the building's overall security plan is non-negotiable.

The construction itself is straightforward, but it has to be planned. Adequate electrical capacity for the locker system, network connectivity for the cloud-based locker software, refrigerated power for cold storage, and wayfinding from the building entrance all need to be in the early design conversation rather than added on at the end. On the multifamily projects we are pricing right now, the package room is one of the conversations we push to bring forward, not push back to the punch list.

The Retrofit Math for Exiting Buildings

For property managers operating existing Chicago multifamily buildings, the package room conversation is one of the highest-return capital projects on the table.

A typical retrofit in a Chicago multifamily building runs in the range of thirty-five thousand to one hundred fifty thousand dollars depending on size, locker count, refrigeration scope, and whether the space requires structural or electrical modifications. The return on that investment is fast. Reduced front desk hours. Reduced theft. Faster lease-up. Stronger renewal rates. Resident satisfaction scores that move in the right direction.

The fix is rarely as complex as it seems. The space already exists in most buildings, usually a former bike room, an oversized mailroom, or a back corner that has been used inefficiently. The construction work is reasonable. The technology is mature. The retrofit pays back through staff time savings, reduced theft, and stronger resident reviews.

Why This is Quietly the Most Important Amenity Conversation

The package room is the only amenity in a 2026 multifamily building that every resident touches every week. It serves one hundred percent of residents at a frequency the fitness center, the rooftop, the pool, or the lounge cannot match. It does not photograph well in marketing brochures, which is why it never gets the design budget it deserves.

The buildings that figure this out are the ones with the highest reviews and the strongest renewal numbers. The buildings still treating package management as an afterthought are the ones with frustrated residents, package theft incidents, online reviews calling out missing deliveries, and front desk staff drowning in pickup inquiries during the holidays.

What Property Managers Should Be Doing Right Now

If your front desk team is spending more than a few hours a day on package logistics, your system is broken. If you have had a theft incident in the past eighteen months, your system is broken. If residents complain about pickup wait times, missing packages, or storage chaos around the holidays, your system is broken.

The package room is the cheapest, fastest, most-leveraged resident experience upgrade most Chicago property managers have available right now. The amenity that residents use most should not be the one nobody talks about.

Final Thought

The most-used amenity in 2026 multifamily is the one nobody puts in the marketing brochure. The rooftop deck and the fitness room and the lounge will keep getting most of the design conversation. But the package room is the space residents touch every week, and that is where the most measurable resident experience gains are being made.

The buildings winning this category in 2026 are the ones that figured out where the actual resident attention is going and built for it.

Designing or Retrofitting a Package Room?

ETI Construction works with Chicago developers and property managers on package room design, retrofits, and capital improvements that match where 2026 residents actually spend their attention.

If you are evaluating a new building or thinking about a package room retrofit, walk the space with us. Request a quote