A Dallas startup that promises to take the hassle out of delivering packages to residents in apartment complexes is moving its business to Austin on the heels of a $3 million investment from a Texas-based venture capital firm.
The premise of Fetch, which launched in summer 2016, is straightforward: Instead of gambling with package deliveries to apartment complexes that may or may not have delivery management or protections, the company keeps packages off-site and delivers them to residents at an agreed-upon time.
Michael Patton, a Minnesota transplant and the company's founder and CEO, has turned the inconvenience of delivering to apartment complexes into a business that he says is set to rake in $1 million by the end of the year.
"I moved to an Uptown apartment about three years ago, and that building was getting 250-300 packages every day," he said. "I saw how much of a pain it was for the property managers."
The company does business exclusively with property managers, who replace any existing parcel delivery infrastructure with Fetch's services. Density equals profitability, Patton said, so dealing with entire complexes guarantees business.
By the time Austin's Silverton Partners invested $3 million in Fetch, Patton had hired 15 people and signed contracts with 15 properties across Dallas, managing packages for 5,000 apartments.
Multifamily housing is often risk-averse and slow to adopt new technologies, Patton said, so it's no surprise that apartment managers have been slow to adapt to the now-billions of dollars worth of meal prep kits, books, video games and smart home products that Americans order every year.
But all of these packages create a huge burden for apartments. A 2014 study from the National Multifamily Housing Council found that only a quarter of complexes used specialized software to track package deliveries and that parcel carriers leave packages with apartment managers when residents aren't home 70 percent of the time.
It's become an issue of lost productivity rather than insecurity, the study concludes.
"How much money is an apartment manager losing from all the time they spend on dealing with this," Patton said.
