As the manager or owner of a luxury residential or commercial community, you know your tenants expect an easy way to access the property and grant access to their guests.
Smooth gate entry might not be the first thing that comes to mind when a tenant thinks of your property’s features. However, the right gate intercom system ensures that tenants view your property positively and can increase your retention rates. Read on to discover what sets the best gate intercom systems apart from the competition.
Convenient Handheld Access From a Smartphone
Before the rise of the internet, wireless technology, and smart home devices, tenants had to use a substation installed in their apartment or office to grant access to their visitors. These substations used copper wiring to connect directly to the gate. Nowadays, tenants can connect to a gate intercom system with their smartphones, allowing them to open the gate from anywhere.
Older generations of gate intercoms require tenants to press ‘9’ on their flip-phone keypads to open the door. But with a smartphone, you can provide your tenants with features and new abilities that allow them to fully manage their own access experiences.
For example, a smartphone app lets tenants text electronic credentials to guests and service providers. These credentials could be PIN codes or QR codes that a guest scans at a sensor. These electronic visitor passes increase convenience while maintaining security on your property. They save time by allowing staff to reduce the amount of time they spend on key management and verifying a guest’s identity. After the guest is done with their visit, the key expires so that nobody can gain unauthorized access to the property with those credentials.
Automatic Car Entry With Vehicle Control Systems
Smartphone access is convenient for all kinds of gates, pedestrian or vehicular. For vehicular gates, in particular, properties can increase convenience for their tenants by investing in a vehicle access control system.
One popular kind of vehicle control system is sticker-based. First, you hand out RFID-enabled stickers to tenants with a parking spot. When they put these stickers on their windshields, they act as a credential that can be scanned by a sensor installed near your gate.
This system comes with one major benefit: As soon as a tenant drives up to your property’s entrance, the sensor automatically opens the gate hassle-free. The driver doesn’t have to spend precious time looking for a physical credential at your gate, eliminating the possibility of traffic jams disrupting one of your property’s most important access points.
Integrations With the Technology You Already Have
Integration is a way to connect two pieces of technology so that you can manage them from the same dashboard. If you have existing access hardware on your property, like smart locks or alarm systems, you should look for an integration-friendly gate access system to simplify property management.
The benefits of integration for staff are huge. On a property without integrated systems, a staff member has to edit permissions on each piece of access hardware manually — and at a property with smart locks and gates that secure dozens of doors, that adds up to a lot of wasted time. Plus, if a staff member forgets to update a lock, it could create a security vulnerability.
However, on an integrated property, staff members can monitor changes to access permissions with just a few clicks or even automate them.
Meanwhile, tenants also benefit from integrations. On a property with a gate, front door, and its own unit door, tenants may have to juggle two or three different keys just to get inside. However, with the help of integrations, tenants can use one credential to access every aspect of the property, from the front gate and apartment door to the elevator and amenity spaces. Regardless of where they’re going, integrations save them time and elevate the convenience they experience when interacting with your property.
