Buildings and employees adapt to increased food and parcel deliveries

With the pandemic, it wasn’t just food delivery people who had a lot of work. At the other end, those who receive orders and orders in the buildings also saw the service increase – the demand grew, but not the salary.

Employees, unions and construction companies agree that this convenience of internet shopping has become part of the routine. And everyone had to adapt.

An alternative found by large or high-end condominiums was to create a room to store orders, whether food or shopping boxes. Creating a small room for orders, however, cannot be overnight.

“You cannot, for example, take a painting studio that is not used and turn it into a room to store merchandise, because the convention does not allow for changing the destination of the area”, explains lawyer and professional liquidator Sidney Spano.

The solution he found was to take advantage of lost areas of the condominium. “You know that room in the basement? There’s always a corner that isn’t used and that was nothing and then it became something.” Where there was not an unoccupied room, Spano took advantage of vacant spaces, raised the wall, installed the door and made drywall.

New buildings, however, are already being launched with environments intended for orders or more practical resources. Luggo, MRV’s branch dedicated to property rental, has adopted lockers at the entrance to the building to store correspondence.

“The delivery man himself chooses the apartment and deposits the order. The resident receives a push and, at night, when he gets home, he picks it up”, explains Rodrigo Lufty, executive business and commercial manager at Luggo.

At first, the couriers had difficulty using the lockers, and the company had to create a visual communication with the instructions. And not all professionals and residents have adapted to functionality. According to Lufty, postal workers prefer to deliver everything to one person, while employees at other companies are used to handing out boxes in the closet.

Luggo also started to adopt, during the pandemic, an auxiliary entrance in its buildings, intended for food delivery. The measure came after a bottleneck was found early in the evening, when the queue of delivery men at the entrance interfered with the flow of residents.

Another trend that the company monitors is the use of drones by food applications, and is already preparing to create places for the equipment to land.

Some administrators have adopted apps to facilitate communication with residents. The startup TownSq, responsible for condominium management apps and which serves more than 14 thousand buildings in Brazil, in addition to the USA, Canada and Mexico, says that there was an increase, from 2020 to 2021, of 135% in deliveries, which represents more than 1 million in Brazil alone.

With an eye on safety, employees of buildings with two gates at the pedestrian entrance are advised to direct the person with the package to leave it in the enclosure, the space between the two bars.

“[Isso é] In order not to have the physical contact of the employee of the building with the delivery man, who could be the real one or could be the one who robbed the real delivery man there in the back street and is impersonating him”, explains Sérgio Meira de Castro Neto, director of condominiums from Secovi-SP (housing union).

Even with these structural changes, the employees of the condominiums, both the smallest and the high-end, felt the demand increase. “He [porteiro] have to take care of the common areas, the reception, the guardhouse, inspect deliveries, call the apartment, wait for the person to pick them up, check if it’s a delivery man or if it’s a bandit”, says Paulo Ferrari, president of Sindifícios (Sindicato dos Workers in Buildings and Condominiums in São Paulo).

Spano, the professional manager, says that some of the buildings under his responsibility already had a courier service. In others, workers eventually take orders to apartments.

“We used the resources already available to avoid burdening the condo’s cash. The most we did was acquire a telephone in some building and create a [número de] WhatsApp to notify residents about the delivery,” he says.

Despite these resources, it is still common for tenants to complain about delays or lack of notice of the arrival of the order. “Sometimes the concierge didn’t have time to do the reception, catalog, move to the small room [de estoque], the courier call the resident or send a WhatsApp. It’s more a matter of logistics than an error, actually”, says the manager.