The Hidden Cost of Package Rooms in NYC Apartment Buildings

Walk into the package room of almost any mid-to-large apartment building in New York City on a Tuesday afternoon and you'll see the same thing: a mountain of boxes, no clear organization system, and somewhere buried in the back, a return from three weeks ago that nobody ever picked up.

That box is the problem nobody has built a real solution for — until now. And it's costing your building more than you think.

Package volume in NYC isn't slowing down. At New York Tower, a 510-unit luxury rental in Murray Hill, doormen reported handling 400 to 500 packages per day — nearly double what they were managing just five years prior. The inbound side of that equation has gotten some attention: smart lockers, notification systems, dedicated package rooms. But the outbound side — the returns — has had essentially zero infrastructure built around it. That's the gap David Returns was built to close.

The Inbound Problem Is Mostly Solved. The Outbound Problem Isn't.

Americans returned an estimated $890 billion worth of merchandise in 2024, according to the National Retail Federation. The average e-commerce return rate now sits at around 20% of all online purchases — roughly one in five things bought online comes back. For the average household, that's about 21 returns per year.

Think about what that means for a building with 150 units. Each month, residents are generating dozens of outbound packages. Those packages don't disappear on their own. They sit in apartments, migrate to hallways, end up in package rooms with Post-it notes, and accumulate until someone makes a trip to a carrier location — a trip that, in New York City without a car, is a real errand.

Package rooms were designed for incoming deliveries. The entire system points in one direction. When a resident needs to return something, they're on their own — and that inevitably means the building absorbs the overflow. David Returns flips that. By providing a structured, scheduled outbound pickup service directly from the lobby, we give the return errand somewhere to go other than your common areas and your staff's time.

What No Solution Actually Costs You

When residents can't handle returns easily, they improvise in ways that create real operational costs for your building.

A box sits outside a unit for a few days. Then it migrates to the package room "for safekeeping." Then it lives there for two weeks while the tenant keeps meaning to make the trip to the UPS Store. Your doorman spent twenty minutes last Thursday helping a resident repack something that should have shipped four days ago. Your package room is operating at 80% capacity because a fifth of what's in it is outgoing returns, not incoming deliveries.

None of this shows up as a line item. But it accumulates — and it all stems from the same gap: no outbound logistics infrastructure.

There's also a security dimension. NYPD data shows package theft complaints increased 23% in 2024 compared to the prior year. A Finder.com survey found that 36% of New Yorkers reported having at least one package stolen in the past twelve months. Residents leaving labeled return packages in common areas — essentially broadcasting "this has resale value" — are contributing to that problem. With David Returns, packages move from the resident's hands directly to a courier on a scheduled pickup, never sitting unattended.

And beyond the operational side, there's the tenant satisfaction angle that actually drives the business case. More than a quarter of apartment residents surveyed by Multi-Family Executive reported experiencing problems or inefficiencies around package management. Tenant turnover costs NYC property managers between $2,500 and $3,872 per unit on average, per industry data from Zego and Innago. The less daily friction residents experience, the more likely they are to renew.

Why Other Approaches Fall Short

Some buildings have tried to solve the outbound problem with in-house solutions. A few common ones:

• "Residents can leave packages at the desk." This puts the burden on your doorman or concierge staff and doesn't actually get the package to a carrier — it just relocates it. Staff still fields questions about it. The package still sits somewhere.
• "We added a UPS drop box in the lobby." Better, but UPS drop boxes have size limits (they won't take most e-commerce return boxes), require labels already be printed, and don't work for USPS, FedEx, or Happy Returns labels. They solve maybe 20% of the problem.
• "We point residents to the nearest UPS Store." This tells residents they're on their own — which is what every other building does. It's not an amenity. It's an acknowledgment that you haven't solved the problem.

None of these approaches actually remove the burden. David Returns does.

How David Returns Works for Buildings

We partner directly with NYC apartment buildings and run a scheduled return pickup service that works for both the building and the resident.

Residents schedule a pickup through the David Returns app, bring their package to the lobby during the scheduled window, and hand it to a David Returns courier. We handle carrier routing — whether the return goes UPS, USPS, FedEx, or Happy Returns — and provide tracking. No staff involvement. No package room overflow. No resident carrying a box to the subway.

For partnered buildings, the service is free for residents. That makes it one of the most genuinely useful amenities a building can offer — something residents actually use, not just once when they move in, but every time they make an online purchase they want to return, which, at 21 times per year per household, is often.

Buildings pay a modest fixed monthly fee. When you set that against the turnover economics — where one prevented non-renewal saves $2,500 to $3,872 in direct costs — the math closes quickly.

What Changes When You Partner with Us

The immediate changes are visible within the first billing cycle: package room clutter from uncollected returns drops, staff stops fielding ad hoc return questions, and residents have a clear, managed channel for outbound packages.

The longer-term change is the one that actually matters for your P&L: tenants who feel like their building is working for them renew. In NYC's 1.4% vacancy market, retention is the whole game. David Returns is one of the most affordable, lowest-friction ways to earn it — because it solves a problem residents deal with constantly, in a building-branded way that keeps the credit with you.

The buildings that are ahead of this problem aren't waiting for residents to complain. They've recognized that outbound logistics is a real operational gap, and they've closed it with a service purpose-built to handle it.