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Package volumes at condominiums and apartment buildings across the Greater Toronto Area have already climbed dramatically over the past several years. The lobby that once handled a handful of parcels a day now processes dozens, sometimes hundreds, and every credible forecast points in the same direction: more growth ahead, not less. For property managers and condo boards trying to plan for the future of home delivery, the question isn’t whether volumes will keep rising. It’s whether their building’s infrastructure is ready when they do.
This isn’t a call to panic about an overflowing package room. It’s an argument for treating parcel infrastructure the way buildings already treat elevators, HVAC systems, and security — as long-term capital planning, not a problem to patch when residents start complaining. And with peak holiday parcel season a recurring stress test every year, buildings that plan ahead of that curve tend to have a far easier fourth quarter than those scrambling to add shelving in November.
Canada Post’s own reporting tells a striking story. Mail volumes have fallen by more than half over the past two decades, yet the corporation’s share of the parcel delivery market eroded from 62 per cent before the pandemic to just 29 per cent in 2023. That drop doesn’t mean Canadians are receiving fewer parcels. It means a wave of new, lower-cost carriers moved in to handle the growing volume Canada Post could no longer keep pace with on its own. Canada Post itself projects the Canadian e-commerce market will double over the next decade. The overall delivery pie keeps growing even as who delivers it keeps shifting.
South of the border, the pattern is just as clear. U.S. parcel volume grew by almost 61 per cent between 2014 and 2022, rising from 13.2 billion to 21.2 billion parcels shipped annually, and by 2024 the average American household was receiving 167 packages a year. Industry estimates currently place the global parcel delivery market at roughly $538 billion for 2026, with growth projected to push it toward $626 billion by 2029. None of these figures describe a market that’s levelling off.
Closer to home, the story is much the same. Industry estimates suggest parcel volumes in Canadian urban centres could grow another 20 to 25 per cent by 2028, driven almost entirely by e-commerce order frequency rather than one-off events. For dense, high-rise residential markets like the GTA, that growth compounds fastest exactly where space for receiving infrastructure is already tightest. A building with limited lobby footprint doesn’t get more square footage as parcel volumes rise; it has to get smarter about how it uses the footprint it has.
It isn’t only shifting consumer habits driving this trajectory. The retailers and carriers moving the most parcels are actively investing in the infrastructure to ship even more of them, more efficiently. Amazon has committed to net-zero shipping by 2040 and is expanding its electric delivery fleet while piloting drone and robotic delivery in select markets. Walmart’s Project Gigaton and its ongoing packaging redesign work — right-sized boxes, paper mailers, and consolidated shipments — reflect the same pattern playing out across the industry: growth and efficiency advancing together, rather than one being traded off against the other.
As we explored in our recent look at the top logistics innovations shaping 2026, the upstream side of the supply chain — warehousing, routing, fulfilment — has become remarkably sophisticated in a short span of time. AI-assisted demand forecasting, automated sortation, and predictive routing are all being deployed specifically to move more volume through the network with fewer delays and fewer failed attempts. Retailers aren’t slowing shipments down to manage costs. They’re getting better at sending more of them, faster, with less waste.
For buildings on the receiving end, that translates directly into more parcels arriving, more often, and increasingly outside standard business hours as carriers optimise routes around traffic patterns and delivery windows rather than a fixed nine-to-five schedule. A building that can only accept deliveries when staff are on-site is, by definition, poorly matched to where the industry is heading.
All of that upstream investment runs into a bottleneck the moment a parcel reaches a residential building. Warehouses have robotics. Delivery vehicles have route optimisation and real-time tracking. But the lobby, the concierge desk, and the package room — the last few metres of an otherwise highly engineered supply chain — often still rely on the same static shelving and manual sign-in processes that were adequate for a much smaller volume of deliveries. A package room sized for yesterday’s parcel counts doesn’t expand on its own, and neither does the amount of staff time available to manage it.
This is exactly the kind of capacity question we walk through in our guide to smart locker sizing for residential buildings. Even buildings that upgrade their receiving space today need to plan with tomorrow’s volumes in mind. If daily parcel counts are already climbing by 10 to 20 per cent a year in many buildings, a solution sized only for current demand will be under strain again within a couple of years — and boards will find themselves back at the same decision point, having spent money on a fix that didn’t actually future-proof anything.
It’s also worth remembering that “the last few metres” doesn’t just mean physical space. It means staff hours spent signing for deliveries, tracking down mislabelled parcels, and fielding resident calls about missing items. Those hours don’t scale down as volume goes up; if anything, the opposite is true, since more parcels moving through a manual process usually means more opportunities for something to go wrong. A capacity plan that only accounts for shelf space and ignores the labour side of the equation is an incomplete plan.
The buildings that will handle the next decade of delivery growth comfortably are the ones treating parcel infrastructure as a long-term capacity decision, not a one-time fix for an overflowing package room. That shift in thinking matters more than any single piece of hardware. A modular, sensor-equipped smart locker system can expand slot by slot as a building’s needs grow, without a full renovation of the lobby. Remote diagnostics and cloud-based monitoring mean issues get flagged and resolved before they become resident complaints. And because the system automates intake and pickup, staff time isn’t consumed one-for-one with parcel volume the way it is with manual handling, which means growth in deliveries doesn’t have to mean growth in labour costs.
This is the practical difference between reactive and proactive planning. A reactive building adds shelving when the package room overflows, then again a year later, then eventually converts a resident amenity space into overflow storage. A proactive building installs receiving infrastructure that’s designed to scale from the outset, and spends the next several years benefiting from that decision instead of revisiting it every budget cycle.
Capacity is only half the equation. The other half is what residents have come to expect from the buildings they live in. A generation of renters and condo owners who grew up with same-day delivery and real-time tracking increasingly view secure, 24/7 parcel pickup as a baseline amenity, not a bonus. Buildings that can offer that reliably, without residents needing to catch a concierge shift or track down a missing package, have a genuine edge in a competitive rental and resale market.
There’s also a financial dimension worth factoring into long-term planning. Modern residential smart locker systems can be configured to support revenue-generating services alongside standard parcel intake, giving boards a way to help offset ongoing maintenance and software costs rather than treating parcel infrastructure purely as a line-item expense. Viewed through that lens, the decision looks less like a cost to be minimised and more like an amenity investment that can partially pay for itself over time.
Boards and property managers evaluating long-term infrastructure decisions can ask a few grounding questions well before a package room reaches capacity:
None of these questions require a crystal ball. They just require applying the same planning discipline to parcel infrastructure that buildings already apply elsewhere.
None of this requires betting on speculative technology. The trends worth planning around are already being piloted or committed to by the largest players in the industry: electrified delivery fleets, AI-assisted routing, and consolidated last-mile drop-offs designed to reduce redelivery attempts. As we explored in the future of e-commerce and smart parcel lockers, the throughline across these developments is consistent. Smart, automated receiving points are becoming the connective tissue between an increasingly efficient supply chain and the resident who’s waiting for their order.
For condo boards and property managers, the practical takeaway is straightforward. Delivery volumes at your building today are very likely the smallest they will be for the foreseeable future. Planning your parcel infrastructure around that reality, rather than around this month’s complaint count, is what separates buildings that stay ahead of the curve from those perpetually catching up to it.
None of the data points in this direction suggest home delivery is anywhere near a plateau. Every major forecast, from Canada Post’s own market analysis to global industry projections, describes a decade of continued growth layered on top of volumes that have already reshaped how buildings receive and manage packages. Buildings that wait for a crisis to justify the investment will always be planning from behind. Buildings that treat parcel infrastructure as a forward-looking capital decision, sized for where volumes are heading rather than where they’ve already been, will spend the next decade benefiting from that choice instead of catching up to it.
Delivery volumes aren’t slowing down. Talk to The Parcel Port about future-proofing your building’s parcel infrastructure today.
