Brent Stojanovic at Navana Property Group explores what booming e-commerce means for the design and management of residential property.
Online retail has had a year like no other and as the dust settles on Black Friday, it’s likely digital sales this Christmas shopping period will be among the highest ever seen. Why should this matter to the housebuilding industry?
While there’s been plenty said about what e-commerce means for our high streets, its impact on the way we design and manage new homes is at risk of being overlooked. Online shopping has been steadily growing for some time, but the pandemic has accelerated a shift in behaviour that housebuilders need to respond to.
At Navana, we’ve seen the impact of rising online orders for ourselves. More than 7,000 deliveries a month were received by residents at one of the developments we manage in north London between February and November this year. That’s a 133 per cent increase. During the busiest times, our concierge team could spend over five hours a day handling packages.
Our sector needs to be alive to these changing consumer trends to create places that reflect modern lifestyles. Factoring online shopping into masterplans and management strategies will help housebuilders create a stronger product and deliver a better experience for residents.
Made to order
E-commerce must now be considered at the early design stages of residential projects. Perhaps surprisingly, the infrastructure needed to better manage online orders can have a significant impact on sellable or lettable floor space across a development.
For starters, there needs to be enough safe parking or drop-off zones for delivery drivers. If people aren’t home to receive deliveries, then storage can quickly be overrun if sufficient accommodation hasn’t been provided. Not all parcels are made equal either, so it’s important to have a mix of smaller lockers and secure spaces for bulkier items. Finally, it might not be glamorous, but with every delivery comes packaging that needs to be disposed of somewhere and waste and recycling facilities must have enough capacity to cope.
All of these different demands for space add up. If not planned well, this infrastructure can also detriment the overall look and feel of a development. It needs to be carefully integrated, while still being convenient for residents to collect their items.
Managing more
Design is one part of the puzzle, the other is managing growing home deliveries. Property managers have already had to adapt services during the pandemic, from adopting more stringent hygiene measures to overseeing the disposal of bulky packaging waste. But half measures introduced to see us through the pandemic won’t fix the long-term impact e-commerce is likely to have on developments.
Resource needs to be built into estate teams to coordinate large volumes of deliveries and ensure they arrive safely and quickly to residents. From a customer service point of view, it’s also important to think about how concierge teams can support people who might need priority support. Not all parcels contain clothes and gadgets. Vulnerable people often rely on home deliveries for their essentials.
There are practical steps that can be taken to smooth operations. For example, our experience has shown the value of teams having access to high-quality broadband so they can communicate with each other and with residents quickly and easily if a delivery is expected.
The rapid increase in online shopping is just one of the myriad ways that the Covid-19 pandemic has changed how we use our homes – as places to live, work and increasingly, shop. With a vaccine (hopefully) on the horizon, the dizzy heights of online orders seen during the national lockdowns might not be matched but consumers have adopted a digital habit that will last. Housebuilders and their partners must recognise this evolution in their design and management strategies and ensure they can cater for it.
