Buy two lockboxes for your Rental Home
By William May
Published: 07/28/03
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So there I am flying on a nice Boeing 737 the other day and the captain came on and said he had good news and bad news.
He said, "First the bad news - one of our engines is no longer working. The good news is - we have a second motor its working great and we'll be landing soon."
In aviation the addition of sometimes unneeded duplicate parts, equipment and systems is called "redundancy." I'll bet you already knew that and are pretty happy that the engineers at Boeing think that's a good thing. We live in Seattle home of Boeing and sometimes the "Lazy B" gets a lot of bad lip about being too big and not nimble but I, for one, am very happy they can keep those tons of flying metal in the air.
So why am I talking about redundancy? Well because you might want to consider some redundancy for your vacation rental home.
Depending on your location, resort and on-site management there are a lot of ways to handle access to your property. Some owners mail keys to their guests. And there are some nice electronic systems out there that allow you to give each guest a unique code to enter your home. But if you're like most folks you probably use a cast-iron coded lock box to give visitors access to keys and the home.
After several years of using such boxes we eventually switched all of our homes to an electronic consumer type coded lock. We found these to be very handy for guests and fairly reliable. But in some locations such as mountain resorts we have had a tiny number of malfunctions. Some of these homes are remote and time consuming for maintenance folks to get to. Naturally that added unwanted expense. In the worst of cases, a guest could arrive at your distant rental home, be unable to gain access and then legitimately request a full refund of his rental fees.
So recently we've been switching back to the tried and true lock boxes. But lock boxes can have problems too. For example, what do you do if the Guest loses the key? Or locks themselves out? Or the lock box malfunctions (I've never heard of that but its bound to happen one day.) So finally we decided to go redundant.
SOLUTION: We now install TWO LOCK BOXES on every house. The first box goes by the front door and with the "secret code" allows the owner to get the key and enter the unit. These boxes are very strong, simple to operate and, again, I've never heard of one breaking. The second box goes by the back door. We use a pre-determined combination for it. Then if a guest should call with any kind of lock or key problem we can simply give them the key to the backdoor lock box and they can gain easy entry.
NOTE: Another idea. For our homes the front and back door keys are always the same key. That means booth keys will open either door and that the keys in the backdoor lock box are the same as in the front door lock box.
Why put the box by the backdoor? Because if you put two boxes by the front door the guest will be confused as to which one to use. Why not have the same combination on each box? Because a guest could then open both, use both keys and lose them both. Don't you know that would eventually happen? And then you'd be back in the same boat assisting a guest from far away with no easy or free solution?
HINT: By "pre-determined" code for the back door - I mean that we have a scheme that determines the back door code based on the front-door lock box. In that way we always know what the back lock box code is. For example: If the front door lock combination is 0529 then you could have the back door combination be 9250 (The front door, backwards). Or you can exchange the first digit with the first digit of the home's address. There are a lot of ways to do this. Naturally you don't tell the guest the system and I'm not going to tell you ours for security reasons but figure out your own system and you'll be ready to go.
HINT: Changing the code on lock boxes is easy but most owner's do not change them with every guest. Its wise to do that periodically and certainly after any guest who was in any way unreliable or you worry could be a later problem. Although you might think it necessary to change the code every time remember that owners who mail keys don't do that and seldom report problems with duplication or theft. Resorts and hotels that still use physical keys do not change them everytime and they don't seem to have problems.
HINT: There are several kinds of lock boxes out there. To be specific I highly recommend the basic unit that can be mounted to any wall surface us a number of long wood screws. I don't recommend using the "over the door knob" type because they are clumsy and more prone to being removed and possibly broken into. There are even some units that have a kind of "Bicycle type" chain or cable on them. I wouldn't recommend these either unless you are in a condo building or large resort where there is no convenient or obvious place to install a wall mount lock box. You should be able to find these lock boxes at Home Depot, Lowes or any local hardware store, or lock smith shop.
COST: So you may be saying to yourself that this isn't a bad idea but it does add some cost. Yep, it does. But here is how I see it. Cast iron lock boxes are about $40 a piece and look like they'd last until the next century. If you have had a box break please drop me an email I'd like to hear about it. You can easily install the box yourself. And that $40 cost will be offset but just one extra trip to the home or call to the lock smith. And think of how much it could save you if you had to refund a weeks rental.
***** As always I seek your feedback. Please share you thoughts, stories, compliments and complaints on this or any other subject by writing me at Director@Vrai.orgDirector@Vrai.org.
Author: William May – Volunteer, Vacation Rental Association
Blog #: 0022 – 07/28/03
Comments: 0
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