The future of access management for multi-residential properties
“Multi-residential” or “multifamily” housing is now Europe’s second-largest real estate sector. Here, as in many other businesses, digitalisation is gathering pace. Access and security management can lead this move to digital, streamlining operations and making life more convenient for residents, property managers and landlords, as a new whitepaper from IFSEC Insider and ASSA ABLOY explores. Some of the key findings are below.
Digitalisation has penetrated almost every area of daily life. It makes sense that we ask it to keep people and property safe, too: “the market is witnessing a digital transformation,” as the whitepaper notes.
When tenants or homeowners choose a multi-residential property, they place their faith in property managers to deliver security without hassle or worry. Building managers must return this trust with responsibility, even in the face of time and cost pressures.
Which is why they increasingly seek solutions which can help to shoulder some of the facilities management burden: Greater efficiency helps multi-residence housing providers to improve their service and boost resident satisfaction. When deployed effectively, a digital access solution becomes a seamless experience for the resident and a reputation enhancer for the housing provider.
Hand-in-hand with digitalisation is the growing appeal of mobile or smartphone keys, also examined in the whitepaper. Many renters now expect the convenience of the mobile world, in everything from food delivery to banking and travel.
With mobile credentials, they get a connected experience, moving around their building hassle-free, between their apartment and common areas such as a gym, laundry room or private gardens. Instead of a bunch of keys, they carry one flexible, shareable virtual key to let visitors in remotely or share temporary keys which expire automatically.
Home automation systems, when integrated with digital access , also offer benefits such as smarter energy usage and real-time security notifications. Thus, convenience, connectedness and control are driving a global Property Technology market which may be worth more than USD 32 billion (EUR 30 billion) annually by 2030. The whitepaper notes: “As more smart devices are installed into multi-residential units, the value for integrating access control into the smart home ecosystem only grows.”
Benefits for property owners, developers and managers
Digitalisation also gives property managers a more efficient way to provide building security for tenants, their visitors, and service providers. They don’t spend hours on physical key management; nor do they need to change locks when keys go missing – which with mechanical security is, unfortunately, too often. The added flexibility in their workflow saves time; even more so if they can manage access from anywhere via a remote or cloud-based system.
From an investment point of view, digitalisation provides more than just this immediate ROI. No one knows for sure where this market is heading. But certainly, installing digital systems in new-builds – and retrofitting them wirelessly to existing properties – seems the best way to future-proof a multi-residential property for whatever comes next.
IFSEC Insider’s new whitepaper, “Multi-residential access management and security: The move to digital”, explores many more trends in this dynamic sector, including office-to-residential conversion and the changing expectations of 21st-century tenants. Download your free copy today.