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Your board chair pulls you aside after the meeting. “Can you look into smart lockers for the building?” Then the meeting adjourns, and you’re left standing in the lobby with a mandate and nothing else — no budget range, no timeline, no sense of what “look into it” actually means in practice.
If you’re a property manager who has just been handed this task, you’re not alone, and you don’t need to start from a blank page. A proper smart parcel locker evaluation for property managers follows a repeatable structure: you quantify the hard costs, you account for the value that doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet, and you come back to your board with a recommendation instead of a shrug. This post walks through that framework end to end.
The vague mandate is a trap. Without a framework, most property managers respond to it in one of two unhelpful ways: they request a single vendor quote and forward it to the board with no context, or they spend weeks gathering opinions from other buildings without ever landing on a recommendation.
Neither approach holds up when the board asks follow-up questions — and they will. What the board actually wants, even if they didn’t say it explicitly, is a clear answer to one question: does this investment make sense for our specific building, and why?
Getting to that answer requires evaluating the decision along two separate tracks, because not every building will justify a smart locker system the same way.
For buildings with meaningful parcel volume and dedicated concierge or front-desk staff, the strongest argument is almost always labour cost. This is the track your board’s treasurer or finance-minded directors will respond to fastest, because it converts an abstract convenience into a dollar figure.
Start by quantifying how much staff time is currently going toward parcel handling. This includes:
Most buildings underestimate this figure until they actually track it. A reasonable approach is to log parcel-related tasks for one or two representative weeks — including a heavier delivery period, if you have one — and calculate an average daily time commitment. Multiply that by the fully loaded hourly cost of the staff member performing the work (wages plus benefits), then extend it to a monthly and annual figure.
That annualized labour cost becomes the number you compare against a smart locker system’s total cost of ownership — hardware, installation, and the ongoing software or service fee. If the projected labour savings cover a meaningful portion of the annual cost, particularly within a 3–5 year window, you have a defensible ROI case to bring to your board.
It’s also worth noting what this calculation doesn’t capture but should still be mentioned in your presentation: reduced liability exposure from missing or damaged packages, and the staff hours freed up for higher-value work once parcel handling is automated.
To make this concrete, consider a mid-sized building where the concierge estimates roughly 90 minutes a day is spent on parcel-related tasks — receiving, logging, sorting, and notifying residents, plus the occasional dispute. At a fully loaded staff cost of $28 per hour, that works out to $42 per day, or roughly $910 per month across a typical work schedule.
Annualized, that’s approximately $10,900 in staff time tied up in manual parcel handling. If a smart locker system sized appropriately for the building carries a total annual cost — hardware amortized over five years plus the ongoing software fee — of, say, $7,500, the labour savings alone comfortably cover the investment, before factoring in reduced liability exposure or improved resident satisfaction.
Every building’s numbers will look different, which is precisely why this calculation needs to be done at the building level rather than borrowed from a vendor’s generic case study. A building with a smaller concierge time commitment, or one that already has efficient processes in place, may find the labour savings alone don’t close the gap — which is exactly when the amenity value track becomes the stronger argument.
Not every building will clear the ROI bar on labour savings alone — and that’s fine, because it isn’t the only legitimate justification. Smaller buildings, lower-volume properties, and buildings without dedicated concierge staff often can’t offset the cost through labour reduction. For these buildings, the case rests on amenity value and resident satisfaction instead.
This is a real, quantifiable-in-a-different-way argument, not a consolation prize. Consider framing it around:
Buildings pursuing this track should frame the investment the way they would any other amenity upgrade — a fitness room refresh or a lobby renovation, for example — rather than trying to force it into a labour-savings model that doesn’t fit. Your board is likely already comfortable approving amenity investments on this basis, which makes the pitch more familiar than it might first appear.
Before you present either case to your board, you need building-specific numbers — not general industry figures. This is where a proper needs analysis comes in, and it’s worth doing before you request vendor quotes, not after.
At minimum, you’ll want to establish three things: your building’s average daily parcel volume, an appropriate expiry period (how long a parcel can sit in a locker before it’s flagged for return), and the resulting number of locker slots your building would require. Our guide on designing the right smart locker system for a residential building walks through this exact calculation step by step, including how parcel volume and expiry period interact to determine slot count. Running your building’s numbers through that framework before you approach vendors means you’ll be evaluating quotes against a real specification, not guessing at what size system you need.
This step also strengthens both tracks of your evaluation. On the ROI side, an accurate slot count keeps your cost estimate realistic. On the amenity side, it ensures you’re not over- or under-selling the scope of the investment to your board.
Once you’ve worked through both tracks, your recommendation should include:
If your board has questions about approval requirements, liability, or how to communicate the decision to residents, our guide on what condo boards need to know before approving a smart locker system covers those questions directly and can be a useful document to share alongside your recommendation.
A few missteps show up repeatedly when property managers work through this process for the first time, and avoiding them will make your recommendation more credible.
The first is presenting a single vendor quote as if it were a market rate. Boards are naturally skeptical of one-option proposals, and rightly so — even a strong quote looks stronger next to two or three comparable ones. Requesting multiple quotes takes more time upfront but saves time in board discussion later, since it pre-empts the “have we shopped around” question.
The second is skipping the needs analysis and requesting a quote based on unit count alone. Vendors can provide a rough estimate this way, but it tends to either oversize the system — inflating cost unnecessarily — or undersize it, leading to complaints about full lockers within the first few months. Building-specific numbers protect against both outcomes.
The third is presenting only one track when both apply. Even in buildings where the ROI case is strong, mentioning resident satisfaction and liability reduction rounds out the picture and pre-empts objections from directors who care more about the resident experience than the balance sheet. The reverse is also true: even in amenity-driven proposals, quantifying whatever labour savings do exist strengthens the case, even if they don’t fully cover the cost on their own.
Finally, avoid presenting the decision as urgent unless it genuinely is. Boards respond better to well-reasoned recommendations delivered on a normal timeline than to proposals framed with artificial pressure. If your evaluation is thorough, it will make its own case.
Coming back to your board with a structured evaluation — rather than a single quote or a vague summary — changes the nature of the conversation. Instead of asking the board to take your word for it, you’re giving them the numbers and the reasoning to make an informed decision, which is exactly what “look into it” was asking for in the first place.
Ready to build the case for your board? Contact The Parcel Port today for a building assessment and a customized ROI estimate. Get in touch here.
