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Realtors and home renting companies use these near me. Signs that say "Let yourself in" and you can get a temporary code to go into a rental and such. From a p

Realtors and home renting companies use these near me. Signs that say "Let yourself in" and you can get a temporary code to go into a rental and such. From a privacy stand point there are many concerns but when renting or leasing you are already bound by laws requiring you to admin maintenance and even owners with sufficient notice. Notice timeliness is all based around the nature of the call. Plus on a safety side, elderly people could have locks opened for emergency persons by a central clearing system similar to how some home security systems are managed. In the long run, you opt out by living somewhere else or owning your own place. There are both pros and cons and we need to focus on both and not one or the other. edit: Another service/feature/etc I have seen lately is bundling standard utilities into the lease with surcharges for exceeding caps (electricity, gas, and water). This relieves the landlord of headaches and new residents from having issues getting services started

skywhopper 8y ago
Sure there are potential positives, but the current state of the art is not ready for this, and if you read the thread, it's clear this particular vendor is absolutely not handling the requisite security concerns in the right way. In any case, there's no good reason not to have a physical key for a fallback. What happens during a power outage and the Internet is down? How is this thing powered anyway? Batteries are a major problem. And again, if it's hardwired, that's also a risk.
Merad 8y ago
These aren't necessarily the same thing. When I was looking for a rental house about 6 months ago, essentially all of the homes I visited were set up with a "smart lockbox". You had to set up an account with a 3rd party service who required a picture of a photo id and a small fee ($5 for 30 days access, IIRC). The rental listings would ultimately link to the 3rd party service where you could schedule a visit to the house, then get a temporary code to access the key when you arrived. All of the homes still used traditional physical locks. I'm not a fan of "smart" devices, but think this was actually a great service as long as the home is unoccupied. As a tenant I was able to easily visit a dozen different homes in one day without having to spend hours on the phone scheduling visits with property managers.

skywhopper 8y ago

Sure there are potential positives, but the current state of the art is not ready for this, and if you read the thread, it's clear this particular vendor is absolutely not handling the requisite security concerns in the right way. In any case, there's no good reason not to have a physical key for a fallback. What happens during a power outage and the Internet is down? How is this thing powered anyway? Batteries are a major problem. And again, if it's hardwired, that's also a risk.

Merad 8y ago

These aren't necessarily the same thing. When I was looking for a rental house about 6 months ago, essentially all of the homes I visited were set up with a "smart lockbox". You had to set up an account with a 3rd party service who required a picture of a photo id and a small fee ($5 for 30 days access, IIRC). The rental listings would ultimately link to the 3rd party service where you could schedule a visit to the house, then get a temporary code to access the key when you arrived. All of the homes still used traditional physical locks. I'm not a fan of "smart" devices, but think this was actually a great service as long as the home is unoccupied. As a tenant I was able to easily visit a dozen different homes in one day without having to spend hours on the phone scheduling visits with property managers.