Sherry Johnson
Sr. Product Manager,
LiftMaster Access Control Accessories
Rental property owner-operators are hands-on DIYers. You excel at multi-tasking, priority juggling, and minimizing costs while retaining tenants. But it’s important to ask yourself if the way you’re running your business is more about running around than growing your portfolio of properties.
Let’s look at the top three ways LiftMaster’s Smart Video Intercom-S (sized right for properties with 2-9 units) can deliver deep value by helping you save time, save money, and reduce stress.
Save Time
Repetitive manual tasks take too much of a property owner’s valuable time. With a smart video intercom powered by myQ Community, you can lose the spreadsheets you use to track resident changeovers. And you can retire the Post-it note reminders you rely on to remember to recover keys during a changeover, to re-key locks, or to get keys into the hands of new residents.
With LiftMaster’s Smart Video Intercom-S, you can automate the process of issuing new tenant access credentials from your laptop or tablet remotely without being physically present at the property.
Better still, you can cancel credentials during a changeover, again without taking time to drive to the property. Take back the time you currently spend on the road going to and from your properties to let people in. And take control of your multi-tasking, project-juggling workday to focus on creating a safe and secure community that residents will love and never want to leave.
So, ask yourself. What’s your time worth? Let’s say it’s $75.00 an hour. Multiply that by a 40-hour workweek and multiply again by four, the number of weeks in a month, and it adds up to $12,000 a month. When you’re running a scrappy operation, it’s easy to consider your time as the cost of doing business. But that’s not the way to create lasting wealth. For more on that, read this article about how to create wealth through real estate investment.
Save Money
Let’s talk money. If you are using physical keys to secure entry, you have the expense of rekeying locks. The average hourly rate locksmiths charge to rekey a lock is $70.00 an hour. If you have nine units and rekey each of them once a year, that’s an average annual expense of $630.00. It’s common to rekey locks three times a year, adding up to an almost $1,900.00 annual expense. And that doesn’t account for the cost of your time to schedule a locksmith, make sure they can get in the unit, and then tag the keys with the right unit number. Source
There is no legislation requiring that locks need to be changed between tenancies. But it would be a good safety precaution for rental property owners as there is no real tracking method to identify if tenants have had general keys cut during their tenancy. Source
Under the legal concept of negligence when a landlord’s behavior is the proximate cause of a tenant’s injury, a court can hold the landlord liable to the tenant — even if the landlord didn’t intend any harm. Source
Additionally, landlords are required to maintain their rental property and conduct regular inspections. They must also fix any potential security problems, such as repairing a broken lock. Source
Here’s the takeaway.
- Physical keys are a security risk to the safety of your residents and the property itself.
- Physical keys require your presence on a property to grant entry to everyone from a maintenance person to a locked-out tenant.
- Physical keys require that you be onsite to give keys to new residents and recover keys during changeovers.
Your time has value. Don’t waste it on an inefficient key management process that seems good enough at first glance. When, in reality, it’s chewing up your time to support a system with inherent security and liability risks.
Reduce Stress
As scrappy, get-it-done real estate entrepreneurs, you may not immediately see the value of stress reduction. So, how about a better night’s sleep? One where a locked-out resident isn’t calling you after midnight to be let in. That’s the problem with keys and fobs. They get lost.
But with a LiftMaster Smart Video Intercom-S, you won’t have to drive to the property to let the resident in. You’ll get a good night’s sleep and wake up ready to seize the day.
Transition to Video Intercom Technology at Your Own Pace
You don’t have to invest in or migrate to a brand-new video intercom access control system overnight. There are small, affordable steps you can take to transition away from physical keys toward more secure technology.
For example, you could begin with a few simple, inexpensive, pieces of hardware and a monthly subscription to myQ Community, which you can deduct as an operating expense.
Using the myQ Community dashboard, you can remotely grant access from your laptop or tablet. And don’t worry about learning new software. LiftMaster sets up myQ Community for you and our dedicated service team will show you how to use it. Better still, they’re available to answer your questions for as long as you have questions.
When you combine myQ Community with a Smart Reader and a 2-Door Controller, you can introduce super-secure mobile credentials that will replace physical keys and fobs that can be copied.
And your residents can download the myQ app and use their smartphone as a key to unlock doors you’ve authorized them to open. Millennials and Gen Z value smart home technology and will pay over $30.00 more in monthly rent to get it.
Use access control technology to attract and keep long-term tenants, reducing the cost of changeovers and increasing your net operating income. Now that’s stress reduction.
Your Data is Secure with myQ Community
myQ Community has completed a Soc-2 audit, part of the American Institution of CPA’s Service Organization Control (AICPA) reporting system. A Soc-2 audit makes sure all the right systems are in place to guarantee the security, process integrity, confidentiality, privacy, and availability of customer data.
The budget-planning season is almost here. Let’s figure out how you can take steps toward a more secure access control system on your terms, in your own time.
Questions? Message me on LinkedIn and I’ll help you get answers.
