Access Control - The Door into Smart Buildings (Literally)

Hey Friends,

We recently performed one of our free vendor selection services for a pair of property development companies looking to find the latest in the access controls category for multifamily properties. For those of you who have been following along with our most recent whitepaper, Navigating the Marketplace, these buyers were in the “Preliminary Market Research” part of their homework. They were both in the pre-construction phases of properties ranging from affordable housing to ultra-high-end luxury condominiums.

Although these buyers represented two separate property development companies, they shared the same sentiment: they didn’t know where the access control market had grown in the last decade. They were interested in learning the options to strategically specify products that made sense for their occupants. So few buyers make this move—specifying technology with the building occupant in mind. More on that later.

With such a niche technology, the first thing that Nexus Labs did was reach out to a subject matter expert (SME). Lee Odess is the writer and founder of the monthly Access Control Executive Brief newsletter and probably knows more about access control than anyone we know. Getting an SME involved in the process early can be the difference between success and failure… a lesson we heard frequently during NexusCon 2024.

With the support of Lee, we created an RFI to help the buyers “kick the tires” of what was possible in access control today. We reached out to over 40 access control vendors, and here’s what we learned:

Lesson #1 - We’re beyond locks and keys

Access Control has evolved quite a bit from the skeleton key. To understand what buildings are capable of doing today, stakeholders need a crash course in the terminology of this niche technology:

• Credentials can be considered a universal word for “key,” since today your key can be your phone, watch, card, fob, fingerprint, iris, or any other device.
  
  
• Readers can be considered a more universal word for “keyway,” since today you may be reading a litany of signals. This is the device that reads the credentials you provide.
  
  
• Panels/Controllers are the brains of the access control system. They can sometimes live within the reader itself, or be hidden away in an electrical closet. The location of this device and the number of readers per panel can significantly impact the cost of wiring up the system.
  
  
• Door Positions Sensors can track when doors are opened and closed, providing better audits of data for security and space utilization purposes. Just like so many categories of technology today, the smarter the system, the more data it’s delivering you.
  
  
• REX Devices have nothing to do with dinosaurs, despite whatever you may be picturing. REX stands for request to exit. These devices are crucial to security for public doors, allowing them to stay locked from the outside while occupants on the inside can quickly request to exit through a button or other interface.
  
  
• Integration and Middleware are critical to improving the value of a new access control system. Access control is commonly integrated with HVAC controls and tenant engagement apps to centralize data tenants may be interested in. These integrations allow for use cases like remotely unlocking your apartment door so the dog walker can get in while you’re still at the office, or enabling your thermostat to automatically adjust setpoints based on your schedule to save energy and improve the occupant experience.

Lesson #2 - “That’s not the way we do business”

The most surprising thing we found was a failure to respond to the RFI. Despite asking over 40 access control vendors to provide information for a new opportunity, the number of responses was in the single digits.

Why is this?

We credit it to the “how we’ve always done it” method. This RFI was a fight against the status quo where buyers and their consultants don’t thoughtfully specify an access control technology.

Instead, the general contractor hires subcontractors to do the work associated with access control. Those subcontractors select access control technologies based on their relationships and “what they’ve always done.” That means that your access control technology could be based on which equipment provider has taken your subcontractor out to lunch the most times, which is a vastly different selection process than picking technology with the end user and their specific use cases in mind.

Another way the RFI broke the status quo was the lack of continuity between application providers and device providers.

Within The Nexus Marketplace, we use the category  “Access Control Credentials” to describe applications tenants may use on their smart devices to unlock doors and interact with the system. We use the category “Physical Access Controls Systems (PACs)” to describe the tangible devices, like deadbolts and card readers, that make doors lock and unlock.

To a buyer, these two categories clearly go hand in hand when considering an access control solution: devices and apps work together to make the system function as a whole.

To vendors, these are wildly different categories that require different engineers and developers to create. Many vendors selling access control credential apps do not sell PACs, and vice versa. Not to mention, the installers of these systems are also an entirely different group of companies.

So when we sent an RFI that included both the application and device sides, we got many responses like “Let me hand you to this person, who can hand you to this person, who can hand you to this person…”

The lesson here is that vendors have to be able to step back and imagine the solution from the buyer’s perspective. Imagine if you were buying a car and you had to talk to the engine, air conditioning, tire, and transmission vendors just to understand what the car could do. Vendors are self-sabotaging the adoption of new technologies by not picturing the solution from the buyer’s point of view.

Lesson #3 - Infinitely upgradeable

Within our RFI, we requested budgetary pricing based on the same building specification given to all vendors.

Our low bid was approximately $20,000, while our high bid was $200,000! That’s a 10x difference.

This price range is a symptom of the number of features you can continue to stack on top of the access control system—for example, the number of credential options. Providing just a fob to your tenants is cheap, while biometrics is not. Each additional credential to open a door comes with an extra cost. Another example is the amount of integration possible. Partnering with tenant engagement apps, HVAC systems, CCTV, and even package delivery rooms adds complexity, CapEx cost, and SaaS to the solution.

This shows the importance of a buyer (or a buyer’s consultant) understanding what features they want so that the building is designed appropriately for the occupier.

Accelerating Technology Adoption

We followed up with Lee Odess to get his take on the lessons we learned throughout the access control RFI process. Lee summarized the state of the industry well:

“Our industry is undergoing a transformative shift from a $10 billion niche cottage industry, often overlooked and governed by old truths, to a mainstream powerhouse attracting significant attention and fostering new paradigms equaling a $100B market. Your experience exemplifies this transition. Newcomers to our field arrive with expectations aligned with these emerging truths, only to find the old ways still deeply entrenched. Rest assured, progress is inevitable. The new truths will prevail, though I estimate it will take about three years for them to become the norm. Each day, with every interaction like this, we inch closer to realizing our potential as a $100 billion market.”  – Lee Odess, Access Control Executive Brief

Nexus Labs performs these free vendor selection services to help buyers accelerate the adoption of new technology within their buildings. Are you a buyer interested in conducting preliminary market research on a category or ready to shortlist vendors to purchase a specific technology? Hit reply, and we’ll help you navigate the vendor swamp.

The key to accelerating technology adoption is sharing learnings from one buyer to another. All the information on access controls that we captured during this RFI process is now available within The Nexus Marketplace so that the next buyer or buyer’s consultant can go through this process with less effort. Sign up for The Nexus Marketplace to browse the categories yourself.

— The Nexus Labs Team