A Phil Hall Op-Ed: Are you still using the United States Postal Service (USPS) to send payments and documents? I am, and I feel as primitive as Fred Flintstone for relying on their mailboxes.
This summer, I’ve had four pieces of mail lost by the USPS. Two of those pieces were checks that were sent off the pay bills, one was a prescription for my dog sent to a prominent e-commerce site specializing in pet merchandise, and one was a document requested by my mother’s health insurance provider that enabled me to answer their questions on her behalf.
Now, I can understand if one piece would get lost – after all, aberrations occur. But four pieces? Since these were all sent by first-class mail without tracking, there is no way to determine what went wrong. One of my mailed pieces turned up several weeks later, but the others are still nowhere to be seen.
To be frank, this would never have happened to me if the four organizations that never received my mail came up to speed with the 21st century. The two entities that were supposed to receive my checks do not have online payment structures. The pet merchandise business needed a paper version of my dog’s prescription – they pointedly refused to accept a PDF copy. And the health insurance provider gave me the option of mail or faxing the document. Seriously, faxing? Are we still in the 1980s?
Strangely, this deterioration in service occurred as the price of mailing letters went up. In July, the USPS implemented a rate increase on first-class postage 78 cents to 82 cents – just short of a 5% rate hike. If you need an example of getting less despite paying more, this is it.
Fortunately, the real estate profession as a whole doesn’t share my state of postal victimhood – this industry was smart enough to ditch the postal stream years ago. Digital technology has effectively excluded the USPS from nearly all aspects of homebuying and selling transactions. Direct mail marketing pieces might be the last vestige of a postal presence in real estate, and even those old-school tools have lost popularity amid today’s instant gratification world of TikTok videos, social media pages, and Facebook and Google advertisements.
Even the remodeling side of real estate doesn’t need the USPS. This summer, I had a bathroom renovation project that was transacted online, with documents uploaded for my DocuSign-based signature. No papers, no stamps, and no anxiety from missing mail.
Oddly, the one area where the USPS could be of service to the real estate industry appears to have gone nowhere. Two years ago, the Biden administration issued a statement that declared the USPS “will pilot the repurposing of certain surplus properties for housing. USPS owns more than 8,500 facilities nationwide, including some that are not needed for postal operations in areas that face a shortage of affordable housing.”
To date, that pilot program has not taken off and no post offices have been redeveloped for residential purposes. Clearly, that idea got lost in the mail.
Phil Hall is editor of Weekly Real Estate News. He can be reached at [email protected].
Photo courtesy of Hanna-Barbera Productions
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