Contributed Collaborative Post
As an employee involved in managing residential properties, one of your core responsibilities will be to ensure that adequate access controls are put in place and maintained.
Inevitably, this will require developing some sort of key control protocol. There are a number of core steps that will need to be taken care of during this process. From conducting a key inventory to choosing a key management solution, this is how you can create your own effective protocol.
Conduct a key inventory
The first step in this process will always be to identify and log every single key across the property in question. These could include the keys to individual apartments and homes, to garages, plant rooms, storage areas and maintenance areas.
The sooner you start this inventory, the easier. It doesn’t take long before a surprising number of copies have been made, with keys lost and forgotten in drawers, jacket pockets and car drink holders.
Establish clear key issuing & return procedures
Another important part of your key control protocol will be establishing a clear procedure for how people will be issued keys when they move into the building, and how they return them again when they move out.
Whenever a key is given out, there needs to be a strict procedure in place to determine whether or not they are authorised to have access to that key. Issuing keys informally can result in a serious security risk, even if everything goes absolutely fine 99% of the time.
Keep a digital record of each individual key issue, including the date, the person the key was issued to, and whether or not there is an expected key return time or date. This latter requirement might only be the case with contractors, as homeowners or renters will only return the keys when they terminate their contract or sell their apartment.
Choose a secure storage & management solution
You’ll also need somewhere to store and manage the keys while they’re under your duty of care.
Companies like Traka provide secure key lockers that are designed to manage high volumes of keys in residential contexts, with a number of useful features.
These cabinets make it easier to facilitate the secure, fast checkout and return of keys, while also ensuring that a digital logbook is automatically updated whenever a key is taken out or given back.
You will be able to see whether or not a key is present in the locker at any given moment on time via a centralised digital portal, without having to manually update anything. This makes it much, much easier to keep track of things, improving both safety and efficiency.
Creating key control protocols for residential properties isn’t too difficult, but it is something that you need to get just right. It is an important responsibility, and the repercussions of getting it wrong can be incredibly serious. Thankfully, by leveraging the modern technologies that are available in this area nowadays, it shouldn’t be too difficult to achieve at all.
This is a contributed collaborative post
