Smart Locks for HMOs & Student Lets

A house of five rooms is six locks, five sets of keys and one predictable problem: at the end of the year you have no idea how many copies exist. The honest answer is that re-keying is the only way to be sure — and that is a locksmith bill per room, every year.

With codes, the same event is a few minutes on a phone. That is the entire business case for HMOs; everything else is a bonus.

This one is not optional. A bedroom door on an escape route has to open from the inside without a key, so a tenant is never hunting for one in a fire. That rules out some products and dictates how the rest are fitted.

Manchester licenses HMOs, and locks form part of what gets looked at. We fit to that requirement as standard — but your licensing conditions are yours, and worth checking against the specification before we start.

The front door is shared by everyone in the house and usually wants one code per tenant, revoked at the end of a tenancy. Room doors want a code the tenant controls, plus an override you hold for access with proper notice.

Where remote management matters, a gateway is needed — and its position has to be surveyed, because Bluetooth range is around 10 to 15 metres in practice and a three-storey house will not reach every door from one spot.

A shared house is quoted as one job, not five. Additional locks fitted on the same visit cost less than the first, because the travel, survey, account setup and handover are already covered — which is why doing the whole property in one go is much cheaper than adding rooms later. Landlord work is invoiced rather than paid on the day. Current figures are on the pricing page.

We survey the whole property before quoting: how many doors, what each one is, and where a gateway has to sit so every lock is actually reachable. In a three-storey house that is rarely one spot, and getting it wrong is why remote access works on some doors and not others.

Fitting is best done between tenancies. Handover is to you, not the tenants: you leave able to issue a code per room, revoke one the day someone moves out, and see which doors are running low on battery before anybody is locked out.