The simple act of asking Irvine Co. property managers a common question—What is your biggest problem?—spawned a startup that’s changed the way apartment dwellers receive packages.
Lori Torres, a former senior vice president with Irvine Co., started Irvine-based Parcel Pending in 2013. She was one of five recipients of the Business Journal’s Innovator of the Year Awards on Sept. 12 (see stories, pages 1, 14, 16 and 18).
Torres saw the explosion of online shopping and the headaches it created for property managers, who were spending a lot of time receiving packages, organizing them, and retrieving them when residents came to pick them up.
Parcel Pending created lockers that residents can access 24/7, freeing leasing managers to work on their primary responsibility of renting apartments.
Her startup has been funded by investors including Irvine-based Tech Coast Angels, which invested more than $1.3 million, and an undisclosed investor that in 2016 kicked in $15 million. Tech Coast Angels, with more than 320 members across five Southern California chapters and a long track record of sizable and profitable investments, is considered America’s premier angel group, according to Grant Van Cleve, president of the OC chapter. It invests almost exclusively in early-stage companies.
As a private company, Parcel Pending doesn’t disclose revenue. It’s handled almost 5 million packages to date, Torres said.
Fast Rise
After high school, Torres got a job as a receptionist for a commercial real estate company with office, retail and multifamily properties. The company no longer exists. She soon transferred into the accounting department but hungered for more challenging work. She asked one of the property managers if she could accompany her on on-site visits to learn how the company managed high-rise office buildings. She learned about the responsibilities of maintaining the properties while providing a high level of customer service, she said.
Within about a year, she was promoted to assistant vice president, overseeing a mixed portfolio of commercial and multifamily assets.
After 10 years, she left to work for San Francisco-based BRE Properties Inc., a publicly traded apartment real estate investment trust. She worked out of its Long Beach office, supervising operations of 2,500 apartment units.
She joined Irvine Co in 2000, starting as vice president of operations, responsible for one-third of the company’s apartments portfolio. She eventually became senior vice president, overseeing 44,000 units and 1,200 employees. Irvine Co. managed about 125 apartment properties at the time; the portfolio generated $1 billion in annual revenue, she said.
Aha Moment
As she was doing site visits, she started to see packages piling up in leasing offices. The on-site teams asked for more staff to manage packages and for larger rooms to store them in.
She started working on the issue while at Irvine Co.—building larger rooms for the packages. But she found that the on-site managers were still spending a lot of time managing them.
“Every 15 packages took an hour to manage,” she said.
Torres had an epiphany that she could better help the managers by starting her own company, prompting her to leave Irvine Co. in late 2012. Her idea was to provide electronic lockers to apartment complexes to store packages so residents could retrieve them at their convenience.
Parcel Pending offers two options for landlords: buy a locker outright with financing options, or get a locker for free with a monthly subscription fee. The lockers start at $6,980 and go up from there, based on how many locker doors are needed.
She started the company as she enrolled in Pepperdine University’s Presidents and Key Executives MBA program in Malibu.
Nuts and Bolts
Parcel Pending built proprietary software that communicates via the cloud to the lockers and to residents. The company initially outsourced its software development to Irvine-based Verys, and after three years brought the team in-house.
The first-time business owner investigated manufacturing the lockers in the U.S. but said it was too expensive on her startup budget. So she traveled to China multiple times to find a manufacturer there.
She bootstrapped the company with about $200,000 and created a prototype before pitching to Tech Coast Angels.
The lockers can be placed indoors or out. Many apartment complexes put them near the mailboxes or in a common area, such as a clubhouse or parking garage. The company has grown to 95 employees. The lockers are now in 40 states and Canada.
Irvine Co. became her client last year.
