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Welcome to our beautiful, gated community. You are looking to purchase a home in a safe place, with an entry gate system to protect against criminal intrusion. Well, you’ve come to the right place!
Or have you?
See those automated gates at the entrance and exit? They only open for those who belong here. While there is no human guard in sight, there are several tiny, electronic guards on duty, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, rain or shine. The electronic guards come in the form of devices that recognize your code entered into the keypad, and your vehicle’s RFID device, and in some cases, surveillance cameras and license plate readers. No matter how slick a criminal may be, no criminal has ever smooth-talked his way past an electronic guard.
How safe is that? Perhaps not as safe as you may think. A security device is only as safe as your property manager allows it to be.
Some communities are managed by a Homeowners Association, with board members who live right there in the community. Other communities are managed by a huge, nationwide property management company, with staff that may not even live in the same city where your community is located. Still other communities are managed by a small, local property management company, with a handful of staff members, in an office located conveniently nearby.
Once you purchase your home in our community, the property manager will make sure you are granted access in the form of a gate code to enter into the keypad at the gate, and your choice of RFID tags, stickers, or remotes to open the gate from your vehicle. Also, a code will be entered into the gate database for you, so if someone enters the code into the keypad, the gate will ring your phone and you can speak to your guest at the gate. If you would like your guest to come to your house, press the “9” on your telephone keypad to open the gate remotely. If not, simply hang up and go back to what you were doing before the phone rang.
Any time you use your gate code or RFID device to enter the community, or when you press the “9” key on your telephone to open the gate for a guest, a record of this will be made in a remote database in the Gatekeeper’s office at the Gate Company, miles away from the community. The Gatekeeper manages a bank of hundreds of databases from all the gates in all of the gated communities in the area.
The Gate Company is located a world away from our bucolic little community, way out there in the dust and dirt, on the old, pothole-festooned county strip, surrounded by construction companies and scrap-metal recycling yards and RV dealerships because, as they say on TV commercials, “No city sales tax!”
Any time something big happens at our gated community and law enforcement gets involved, the Gatekeeper runs a report from our gate database, which shows a listing of all the codes and devices that were used to open the gate during the timeframe in which the event occurred. This report is only as useful as the data contained in the gate’s database.
If the property manager is diligent about keeping the gate database up to date by emailing the Gatekeeper a notice any time someone moves in or out, or when a resident buys or sells a vehicle and needs a device number added or removed, the gate database will have a current listing of all the residents’ codes and devices, which makes a very effective report for law enforcement to use in their investigation.
If a property manager is careless, the community suffers much unauthorized access, with a corresponding uptick in crime. People who moved away long ago will continue to have access, including disgruntled exes. Anyone out there who buys a vehicle from one of the neighbors will inadvertently buy unauthorized access to the community. Careless property managers literally roll out the red carpet to criminals.
How do careless property managers roll out the red carpet to criminals, and why on Earth would they do that?
A careless property manager’s only reason for existence is to collect as much money as possible from you, and to do the absolute minimum for it. A Gatekeeper can easily spot a careless property manager with one look at the gate database. If there are anonymous access codes and devices activated in the gate database, the property manager does not give a rat’s patoot about the safety and security of the community.
On the rare occasion when a crime occurs in a careful property manager’s community, the Gatekeeper runs a Gate Activity Report, and a complete list of everyone who entered the community appears, along with the method they used for access — a code or a tag or a remote, for instance. This is a very useful tool for catching criminals.
A vendor code used in the middle of the night is a big, red flag on a Gate Activity Report. Careful property managers limit the hours vendors may access the community, and this cuts the crime rate significantly.
When yet another crime occurs in a careless property manager’s community, the Gatekeeper can run all the reports in the world, but the gate database isn’t going to report any useful information. All it will report is that a few hundred anonymous people accessed the community during the timeframe in question.
Any device numbers and entry codes that are in a careless property manager’s gate database will just be random numbers, with no names attached to them. The careless property manager has no idea who has access to the community. In fact, the careless property manager likely has no idea what kind of device opens the gates in the first place.
The automated gates to the community are managed by the Gatekeeper at the Gate Company. The Gate Company is in the business of maintaining our gates, and keeping them fully operational, regardless of whether our property manager is careful or careless. The Gatekeeper is always careful because the Gatekeeper must also answer to careful property managers and Homeowners Associations.
Careful property managers purchase access devices in quantity, keep them in a secure place, dispense them to the residents, and notify the Gatekeeper at the Gate Company of any changes. When a resident moves away, the careful property manager has the Gatekeeper deactivate the former resident’s devices and codes. When a resident receives a device, the careful property manager sends the Gatekeeper an email to enter the resident’s name and device number into the gate database, and whether or not the access device is limited to certain hours — for a vendor, school bus, or courier, for instance.
The careless property manager doesn’t want to be bothered by you and your silly requests, and has a one-size-fits-all answer to all your questions — “Just call the Gate Company!”
The Gate Company has no way of verifying who you are or where you live. When a careless property manager refers you to someone else for access devices, that means anyone can buy unfettered access to your community — criminals, for instance.
The Gatekeeper is uncomfortable selling unfettered access to our community, but a careless property manager bullied the Gatekeeper into it, by threatening to take our gates to a competing Gate Company that will keep its head down and sell willy-nilly access to our community without asking any questions.
The resulting crimes that occur in carelessly managed gated communities don’t bother the careless property manager at all, since the crime isn’t occurring in the careless property manager’s neighborhood; it’s happening in ours. It does, however, bother the Gatekeeper, sitting there a world away, at a bank of databases at the Gate Company, way out in the dust and dirt on the county strip.
When a careless property manager’s community is pillaged by criminals who likely “just called the Gate Company,” the Gate Access Reports don’t tell law enforcement anything.
Careful property managers curate gate codes. A careful property manager will not allow residents to have repeating codes (i.e., 1111, 4444) or sequential codes (i.e., 1234, 9876). These are the first random codes that a criminal will try punching into the keypad to gain access, so the careful property manager will disallow them to be activated in the first place.
The careless property manager will ask the Gatekeeper to make 1111 the property management company’s universal gate entry code at every single gated community that they manage.
Police and other Emergency Services often ask for 0911 as a gate code. It makes much more sense to have 9111 as an emergency gate code because it can be punched in a lot faster in an urgent situation — push “9” and then keep stabbing “1” until the gate starts to move. Also, 9111 is just as easy to remember as 0911, and far less likely to be used by criminals attempting unauthorized access.
On a side note, creative property managers tend to assign correlating codes — 5050 for police, 0420 for dispensary deliveries, and 5150 for the Post Office, for instance.
Why 5150 for the Post Office? In law enforcement, 5150 is the official code for when someone goes Postal, and must be taken to the county hospital’s psychiatric ward for 72 hours’ observation instead of being booked into jail.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not reflect the views of Bitcoin Insider. Every investment and trading move involves risk - this is especially true for cryptocurrencies given their volatility. We strongly advise our readers to conduct their own research when making a decision.