Could your home become your street’s parcel point?
Your front door is the only part of your property a stranger is expected to reach. A few houses on every road are better placed than the rest to take what arrives.
Ireland’s seven main delivery companies handled 140.73 million parcels in 2023 — up from 91 million five years earlier — and domestic parcels rose 6% in a single year. Households now send as well as receive: An Post says Vinted is driving footfall into post offices with people posting and collecting packages. More parcels are moving through Irish neighbourhoods, and they need somewhere convenient to land.
For a parcel to be safe at a house, two things have to be true at the same time.
Neither is much use on its own. A good porch at an empty house is no use to anybody, and a house with somebody always in and nowhere dry to put anything is no use either.
- A place.Dry, inside your boundary, reachable without going through the house, and easy to describe in one sentence.
- A presence.Somebody usually in, in a house the road already knows.
- A van can stop. A courier who cannot pull in will not come back.
- You would leave your own delivery there. If you would not, neither would anybody else.
- It stays outside the house. Nobody needs to be let in, and nothing about the house changes.
- The spot Somewhere dry, inside your boundary, that a person can reach without going through the house. A porch. A storm porch. A covered step behind a gate. A shelf inside a hall door that is open when you are in.
- The message A parcel arrives, you send a message, and somebody calls in on the way home from work. The door goes a bit more often. There is a shelf that fills up and empties again.
- What to agree Which neighbours, how they will know it has come, when they can call, how long you will hold it, and what you will not take. Before anything arrives, not after. Say that last one out loud — nobody wants to mind a fridge.
- Who is responsible If your neighbour asked the shop to leave it with you, the shop’s responsibility ends the moment you take it in. If a courier leaves it and nobody asked, the shop stays responsible until your neighbour has it. Neither is a reason not to do it. It is a reason to know which one you are doing.
- Insurance Ordinary home cover is not written for holding other people’s goods. Worth asking your own insurer, because the answer depends on your policy.
- If money is involved Doing it as a favour and doing it for payment are not the same thing. As a favour it is a private arrangement between neighbours. Once you are paid, planning, insurance and data protection can all come into it. That does not make it impossible — it makes it a different decision.
Responsibility, insurance and being paid, in detail
Insurance. Ordinary home cover is not written for holding other people’s goods, and whether yours stretches to it depends on the policy. Ask before anything arrives.
Planning. Doing it as a favour is ordinary household activity and needs no permission. It only becomes a planning question if part of the house is being used for a business, and that does need permission.
Data protection. The rules that leave ordinary household activity alone stop applying once money is involved. A list of neighbours’ names and addresses becomes something you are answerable for.
What it changes day to day
Nothing about the house changes. Nobody needs to be let in. There is a shelf that fills up and empties again.
It is your door. You choose who is on the list, you decide the sizes and the hours you are happy to be called to, and you can change your mind. If nobody is usually in during the day, this is not for your house — and that is a perfectly good answer to reach early.
What changes is not really the day. It is where your house sits on the road.
Where this exists, and where it does not
And the network got smaller. Fastway Ireland, which ran the Parcel Connect collection network, ceased trading in October 2025. More is arriving, and there are fewer counters to take it.
In Singapore, an online shopping company has been paying householders since 2023 to receive parcels for people living nearby, usually within a couple of hundred metres. Customers collect from a neighbour’s house instead of waiting in for a van. It works, and it is not popular with everybody: residents raised the things you would expect — strangers calling, noise at the door, and worries about things going missing. Both halves of that are worth knowing.
PlotNua does not arrange this, does not introduce you to couriers, and cannot tell you what your neighbours will ask of you.
Not here yet.
Everything above can be done in Ireland today, as a favour between neighbours. Being paid to do it cannot.
The collection networks here are built on shops and lockers: An Post signs up stores, and the locker companies sign up businesses and landlords. We could not find anyone offering it to private houses.
Elsewhere they have. In Singapore an online shopping company has been paying householders since 2023 to take in parcels for people living nearby — and residents there raised the things you would expect. There is a house on every road already, and nothing has to be built. Whether anything comes of that here is not known.
