Multifamily operators have spent the better part of a decade digitizing the resident experience. Leasing happens online, maintenance requests move through an app, and packages are tracked to the unit door. Yet ask a property manager how residents actually get through the front gate, into the garage, or through the fitness center door, and the answer is often a patchwork of a fob here, a PIN pad there, and a paper guest list taped to the leasing office window. Access, arguably the most basic function of a physical property, has lagged years behind the rest of the digital transformation happening around it.

That lag has a cost, and it is bigger than most operators realize. We might call it the Access Tax, the hidden expense created when access across a property is fragmented, manual and disconnected. It shows up in staff hours, in avoidable operating expenses, in resident satisfaction, and increasingly in how a property is valued. As owners and operators look for ways to protect net operating income while meeting rising expectations for convenience and security, access deserves a harder look, not as a hardware purchase but as an operational system with measurable financial stakes. We see this in our work at Chamberlain Group.

An accepted cost

A resident loses a fob and someone reissues it. A lock wears out and someone rekeys it. A guest cannot get through the gate and the front desk fields the call. Handled one at a time, none of these feel like a crisis, which is exactly why they have gone largely unmeasured. If property teams lose even 30 minutes a day on access-related tasks, that adds up to roughly 130 hours a year, more than three weeks of full-time staff time spent resetting credentials, tracking down lost keys and fobs, and manually granting guest access. That figure also leaves out the midnight call when a resident is locked out, and the frustration on both ends of it.

Residents, meanwhile, move through a property across multiple access points, including gates, garages, mailrooms, amenity spaces and package rooms, and they often meet a different credential or process at each one. When a single credential does not work across every door, the property team becomes the fallback system, buzzing in guests, resetting codes and fielding after-hours calls that pull staff away from higher-value work. The cost rarely shows up as its own line on a P&L, but it shapes resident sentiment and staff capacity in ways that are hard to ignore.

The problem compounds across a portfolio. A regional manager overseeing 10 properties may effectively be managing ten different access systems, each with its own hardware, credentials and vendors, which makes it harder to standardize, to see activity across properties, and to hold each one to the same standard.

Looked at this way, the value of solving access friction goes beyond labor savings, though those are real. It extends to resident satisfaction, competitive positioning and potentially revenue. Renter interest in paying for mobile access control appears to be growing, with 34 percent saying they would pay more for the ability to remotely monitor entry and grant guest access, up from 19 percent in 2019, an increase of roughly 79 percent, according to a 2023 Allegion study. Access may therefore be a factor in leasing velocity, retention and asset value, not only a back-of-house maintenance issue.

The more useful question for owners is not whether a property needs new hardware at the door. Most operators can comfortably answer no. It is what the current approach to access costs them in labor, avoidable expense and resident experience, along with the rent and retention they may be leaving on the table. Far fewer operators have taken the time to answer that.

Measuring your own

Most operators can size the Access Tax within a month without buying anything new, and the work starts with four numbers. The first is credential churn, meaning how many fobs, cards and codes the team issued, reset or deactivated last month, along with what each one cost in hardware and staff time. From there, it helps to count rekeys and lock replacements at turnover and outside it, since each one is a cost a digital credential can avoid. After-hours access calls are the third piece, and logging every lockout, gate call and guest buzz-in outside office hours, along with who handled it, shows where staff time goes when no one is watching. The last step is a count of systems per portfolio, which means listing every access system, credential type and vendor across properties. It is worth making that list before assuming it is short. Putting the hours against a loaded staff rate and adding the hardware spend produces the total, which also serves as the baseline any access investment should be measured against.

We would expect more operators to treat access as one connected system rather than a series of fixes at each door, and the first step is simply knowing what the current approach costs.

The post The Access Tax: The Hidden Cost of Friction in Multifamily Operations appeared first on Propmodo.

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