Choosing door locks for your rental property is a more complicated process than choosing door locks for your home. The security needs of a rental property are more complex than those of your primary home. Therefore, the locks in a rental property should have more capabilities than the locks in your home.
In a rental property:
- Unlike in your home where access to the property is limited to your family and close relatives, the number of people who will have access to a rental is almost unlimited.
- The identities of the people who live in a rental are not fixed. Tenants are constantly coming and going and past tenants continue to pose a security threat to the property.
- Furthermore, you do not have a personal relationship with the people in a rental property. This lack of personal connections increases the security risks to the home.
- Lastly, due to the never-ending stream of renters moving in and out of a rental home, you need a way to easily grant access to tenants and employees or withdraw it.
The type and quality of locks you choose for a rental affect the performance of the rental property business. Door lock choice influences the level of control you have over the security system and how much time you invest in managing access to the property explains TrustArt Realty Management. It affects your tenant’s relative sense of safety and the quality of tenants your property attracts.
What to think of when choosing locks for a rental property?
The following four considerations are what you need to look at before choosing a door lock.
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Tenant turnover
If you own a short-term rental, its security needs will be different from the needs of a home that leases for the long term. If you had to get a new lock every time a guest leaves your Airbnb, you would not make any money at all on the property.
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Key control
Once you hand the keys to a tenant, it becomes hard to tell how many copies of them there might eventually be. The tenant could make copies of the key and the higher the turnover of tenants in the property, the greater the risk of this happening.
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Ability to rekey the lock
The right lock should give you the option of rekeying the lock versus replacing it after your tenants move out. With this option, you can easily change the keys to a lock and make sure none of your previous tenants have access to the home.
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Security
To prevent illegal entry into your property, you want to be sure the locks are hard to pick, bump-key resistant, and have drill protection. You may also want to reinforce doors with deadbolts and other additional measures.
Three types of locks for your rental property
What exact locks should you buy to have key control and good security, and yet not restrict your tenants’ ability to come and go freely?
1. KwikSet
Kwikset locks are designed to be easy to rekey and they are simple enough for you to do this by yourself. This means that you don’t need to call a locksmith every single time a tenant moves out of your rental. All you need to do is insert the old key and the learning tool that comes with the lock.
This will wipe the lock’s memory and you can then insert a new key to teach the lock. This process takes only a few minutes and the only thing you have to buy is a new key. But this system is great only if your tenants stay for the long term; it will not work for Airbnb.
2. Keypad locks
These use keypads instead of locks to open the door. To open a keypad lock, all you need is to enter the correct code. The advantage of this type of lock is it eliminates the possibility that keys will go missing and find their way into the wrong hands. You can store multiple codes in the keypad; for different users or to give access to employees only within certain hours of the day.
There is no risk of tenants replicating a key, although they can always share the code with others. But you can easily reprogram the locks and make the old codes useless. With this system, you even have a record of which codes were last used to access the property. Locks that let you grant or withdraw access using the internet are perfect for Airbnb.
3. Landlord locks
Landlord locks take rekeying to another level. They look like ordinary locks but have cylinders that can easily be removed and replaced. The new cylinder will come with a new key and the old one may be rotated to another rental property or sent to the lock company for rekeying. One of the best features of a landlord lock is it lets you have a master key that will work with all the locks you own. This removes the need to carry a different set of keys for each property.
