Remember the game Frogger? Depending on your age, you either played it in an arcade or on your PlayStation or Nintendo – or maybe you did both. Basically, the frog had to overcome a whole lot of challenges to get across the street. The better you got at the game, the harder it became. To me, dealing with package management has been like a game of Frogger for the past 15 years.

Years ago, no one needed a package room in an apartment building. Then we all got home internet and started online shopping. The inflection point came along with Amazon Prime, when free shipping made ordering online even more enticing. Then people got tired of seeing packages scattered all over leasing offices.

The first attempt to overcome that challenge was to build a package room. Building owners started with half of a square foot per apartment, so a 200-unit building would have a package room with 100 square feet. Then we went to one square foot per apartment, two square foot per apartment and to multiple package rooms.

But you know what? That didn’t get the frog across the road. Every one of those decisions was inadequate.

Then we tried package lockers that sent a code to alert residents about a delivery. Now we use third party package lockers where the delivery company places the package in the locker and communicates directly with the resident, but we still have to deal with oversized packages.

Single-family home residents face this too, but they have the power to decide for themselves if they want a delivery to be dropped on their porch, placed in their garage or even inside their home.

We need to find ways to empower our residents with that same flexibility, so they can authorize a package to be delivered to their front door, inside their unit, in a locker or in a central repository for oversized packages. We need variations on that for fresh deliveries such as refrigerated storage or to grant access to place it in the resident’s refrigerator. A few years ago, we all thought we’d have drone ports on our buildings. That’s still probably coming. And autonomous delivery vehicles on the ground will have to be accommodated, too.

There are three stakeholders to balance here: the residents, the building owners and the delivery companies, but sometimes that feels impossible. Just when we think we’ve found the perfect solution, something changes, and we need to evolve again. It’s a major logistical challenge with billions of dollars at stake. At Bonaventure, we keep leveling up to the next solution – just like in Frogger.