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When a resident’s package goes missing from the lobby, the first call your property manager gets usually isn’t “thanks for letting me know” — it’s “who’s responsible for this?” For condo boards, condo package theft liability isn’t just an awkward conversation to have at the front desk. It’s a risk-management question that touches your corporation’s insurance, your declaration, and ultimately, the trust residents place in their board.
This guide answers the questions boards and property managers raise most often when a parcel disappears — and what proactive steps actually reduce exposure, rather than just shifting blame after the fact.
A decade ago, most condo buildings received a handful of parcels a day. Today, with online shopping the default for everything from groceries to electronics, many GTA buildings see dozens of deliveries arriving daily — often without a consistent system for tracking who received what, when, or from whom. That gap is exactly where liability questions start.
When a resident reports a missing package, the board is rarely the party that physically lost it. But the corporation is the party residents look to for answers, and in some cases, for compensation. Understanding where your actual legal exposure begins — and where it doesn’t — is the first step toward managing the risk properly.
Generally, no — not automatically. Most condominium declarations and rules don’t assign the corporation responsibility for parcels delivered to common areas unless the building has taken on an active role in receiving, storing, or controlling access to those packages. If a courier simply leaves a box unattended in an open lobby and it’s later stolen, that’s typically treated as a matter between the resident and the carrier, not the condominium corporation.
That said, “generally not liable” isn’t the same as “no exposure at all.” If your building has represented to residents that packages are being monitored or secured — through signage, a concierge policy, or a designated drop area — and that representation turns out to be inaccurate, the analysis can shift. Consistency between what residents are told and what’s actually happening matters.
Yes, meaningfully. Once a staff member or concierge physically accepts a parcel on a resident’s behalf — signs for it, logs it, or places it in a secured area under the building’s control — the building has arguably taken on a degree of custodial responsibility. If that package then goes missing while in the building’s care, the corporation’s exposure is considerably higher than in a scenario where the courier simply set the box down in a public lobby.
This is precisely why ad hoc concierge acceptance — without a consistent log or secure storage process — tends to create more risk than no acceptance process at all. A building either needs a reliable chain of custody for accepted parcels, or a clear policy that staff do not accept deliveries on residents’ behalf.
It depends entirely on your policy, and this is a question worth raising directly with your insurance broker rather than assuming either way. Condominium corporation insurance is generally designed to cover damage to common elements and the corporation’s liability to third parties — it isn’t typically structured to reimburse individual residents for the value of a missing parcel, particularly when the corporation never took possession of it.
Where coverage questions get more complicated is in scenarios involving negligence — for example, if a building advertised a “secure parcel room” that turned out to have a broken lock for months. Ask your broker specifically how your policy treats claims arising from common-area deliveries, and whether any endorsements apply. This article offers general guidance only; your insurance broker and condominium counsel can confirm how your specific policy and by-laws apply to your building.
In most cases, this falls outside the condominium corporation’s responsibility entirely. Once a courier marks a parcel as “delivered,” the carrier and the retailer are typically the parties accountable for confirming it reached the right recipient. Boards sometimes get pulled into these disputes simply because the building is the last known location, but the underlying responsibility usually sits with the courier or shipper, not the corporation.
A few practical, low-cost steps go a long way:
Yes — and this is one of the simplest risk-reduction steps available. A short notice or addition to the resident handbook clarifying exactly how deliveries are handled sets expectations before a dispute happens, not during one. It also protects the board: residents who’ve been clearly told that staff don’t accept packages on their behalf have a much harder time arguing the corporation was negligent when something goes missing.
Considerably. One of the recurring challenges in these disputes is that there’s often no record of what happened — no timestamp, no signature, no way to confirm whether a package was ever actually delivered to the building at all. A documented chain of custody, even a simple one, gives the board something concrete to point to rather than relying on conflicting accounts from residents, staff, and couriers after the fact.
It’s worth thinking about it as both. The convenience side gets most of the attention — residents retrieve parcels on their own schedule, and staff stop fielding delivery questions. But from a risk standpoint, an automated system that logs every deposit and retrieval with a timestamp gives the board exactly the kind of documented chain of custody that’s missing in most “concierge holds it somewhere” arrangements. When a resident says a package never arrived, the board has a record to check rather than a guessing game.
If your board is already weighing infrastructure options, it’s worth comparing this approach against the more traditional alternative directly — we’ve laid out how smart lockers compare to a conventional package room in terms of security, staffing, and long-term cost. For boards earlier in the process, our guide to what condo boards should know before approving a smart locker system walks through the approval process, vendor questions, and budget considerations in more detail.
None of this requires your board to become a legal expert overnight. The boards that handle parcel liability best tend to do three things consistently: they put their policy in writing, they’re honest with residents about what level of security actually exists, and they look for ways to create a documented record of deliveries rather than relying on memory and goodwill. Whether that record comes from a logbook, a concierge sign-in sheet, or an automated locker system, the principle is the same — clarity now prevents disputes later.
If your building is still relying on an informal process for handling deliveries, this is a good moment to revisit it at the board level, ideally alongside your property manager and insurance broker.
This article is intended as general information for condo boards and property managers, not legal advice. For guidance specific to your building’s declaration, by-laws, or insurance policy, consult your condominium’s legal counsel or insurance broker.
Curious how a smart locker system could reduce your building’s liability exposure? Contact The Parcel Port for a no-obligation consultation.
