The (im)personal touch?
Home is where we keep ourselves and our loved ones safe, so we have to feel safe there, and for that, the key is security.
Have no fear,
How best to achieve it? Via a friendly doorman, or an eye in the sky or the ceiling?
A comforting face and a consciously formal uniform
As chronicled in this New York Times article, there are arguments on each side:
JIM CRAWFORD lives in an apartment building where he doesn’t need a key to get past the locked front door. He presses a button on a key fob.
But when he lost that fob recently, all he had to do was walk up to the building, and before he reached the door a voice cheerfully boomed from the intercom, “Hey Jim, go right ahead,” and the door buzzed quietly until he was safely inside.
The eye is electronic. The voice is disembodied. The decision, however, is entirely personal.
“I’m here to help you.”
The idea of a formless voice coming out of the ether to welcome him home didn’t faze Mr. Crawford one bit. “I thought it was great,” he said. “It means they recognize me immediately, and they’re watching the building carefully.”
“They” are the operators at Cyberdoorman, a virtual-doorman service based in the
While monitoring the building from a remote location, virtual doormen can receive packages for residents by giving delivery people access to a locked package closet in the lobby, and they can also help keep out unwanted visitors, like the nanny who was just fired or the boyfriend who was just dumped.
What we have here is thus a mixture of technology (remote cameras) and service (people watching screens). That means one person can be in lots of places simultaneously — or at least, her voice can.
The conundrum of disembodied … solved!
Virtual-doorman services have been installed mainly at buildings with fewer than 40 apartments, where a real doorman would be prohibitively expensive.
The cost-benefit equation is quite different between a human (one person, cost shared among many) and a security-cam network (lower initial cost, monthly per-apartment fee). These dynamics are further likely to change over time, as technology gets better and broadband gets cheaper.
Residents at some of the dozens of buildings that use these systems say that over time, they have developed friendly relationships with their virtual doormen.
Presumably, so long as the virtual doorpeople have continuity, they will come to know their customers.
Like real doormen, the people who watch the monitors — mostly women, in another twist on the profile of conventional doormen — say that they too feel as though they’ve gotten to know some of their tenants.
As they should. Technology is a lever, and communications is one of its most powerful uses.
People who are used to a doorman who can physically open the door, say “Good morning” and flag a taxi for them will be unimpressed, Ms. Drewry said. “If you need that personal touch, this isn’t for you,” she said. “But if you’re not high maintenance and you don’t want to worry about tips, then this is just right.”
In fact, a virtual doorman can be more helpful than one in-person:
There’s Sabrina Smith, a
Cyberdoorman also helped Ms. Smith and her husband entertain one night when they had a party for about 70 people. With the guest list in hand, Cyberdoorman screened and let in all the guests, leaving the couple to concentrate on the party.
Ms. Smith recalled one instance where Cyberdoorman made her feel particularly well cared for. It was in the middle of the night, shortly after she had moved into the building last summer. The building’s fire alarm went off, and Ms. Smith was home alone with her baby daughter. She stood in the lobby pondering whether it might be another false alarm, when her cell phone rang. “It was someone from Cyberdoorman, and she said, ‘Ms. Smith, you look really worried; it’ll be all right,’” she said, adding that it was a virtual pat on the shoulder that came at the perfect moment.
What does it cost?
A friendly smile is beyond price, isn’t it?
Depending on the level of sophistication and the number of cameras, the services cost $10,000 to $70,000 for installation and $6,000 to $30,000 in annual maintenance.
In addition to being a convenience for tenants, virtual-doorman services can increase property values. Jonathan Miller, an executive vice president of Radar Logic and its director of research, said apartments with an attended lobby could expect about a 12% premium on sale prices over comparable apartments in non-doorman buildings.
“A virtual doorman is probably about halfway between not having a doorman and having a fully tended lobby,” Mr. Miller said, “because you don’t have a human being physically there, but you do get human interaction.”
Does it pay for itself? Let’s do the math.
What’s it add up to?
Taking the averages, we have a $40,000 installation cost and an $18,000 run rate. Capitalize $18,000 at 8% annually, add back the $40,000 hard cost, means the system loads about $265,000 onto the building’s cost. If we accept Mr. Miller’s contention that a personal doorman is worth 12%, and a virtual one half of that (6%), then the building needs a pre-system value of $3,750,000. With apartments in
Any building of five or more apartments would almost certainly benefit from installing such a system.
Timothy Crowley, the managing director of FLAnk, a development group that specializes in smaller buildings and that has used Cyberdoorman in its projects, said having enough employees for full-time doorman service would cost more than $250,000 a year, which “in a small building would be a crushing expense, so this is a neat solution for what otherwise would be a non-doorman building.”
Another way to look at it is versus a personal doorman.
What’s your capitalized cost, sir?
At $250,000 annually, capitalize that at 8%, the human beings represent an embedded capitalized cost of $3,125,000. Even if we assume that a doorman’s twice as valuable as a virtual system, the virtual system is effectively about six times cheaper for the value.
Hard to argue with, isn’t it?
But Matthew Nerzig, a spokesman for the doormen’s union, Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, argued that “while cyberdoormen offer building managers a way to cut costs, they obviously can’t compete with actual doorman when it comes to providing professional service and security to tenants.”
Obviously?
What if the virtual doorman is more secure?
For most buildings, a doorman — either real or virtual — gives residents a sense of safety. But Mr. Crowley of FLAnk said he believed that in some ways, a virtual doorman could make a building safer than a real doorman. “Whatever a virtual doorman lacks in arms and legs, it makes up for in security,” he said. “If someone’s up to no good, a virtual doorman can lock down a building.”
This is a developer talking, someone who cares only about the market value. He’s interested but agnostic.
Ross Berman, a principal at New York Citiwise, a developer using Virtual Doorman in some of its projects, said a virtual doorman could immediately notify a resident of a delivery by phone, e-mail or text message, “but a real doorman couldn’t do that without leaving his station.”
It’s a basic principle of communication — you’re most in touch when you’re at the switchboard.
I’m the heart of this network
Twenty-four-hour surveillance cameras can also provide visual records of any criminal wrongdoing. Both Cyberdoorman and Virtual Doorman have provided the police with video to help in investigations.
Very handy in these litigious and digital times.
Seth Barcus, a systems designer at Best Monitoring, the security company that created Cyberdoorman, said the company had provided video of break-ins in garages and of vandalism. “There was also a case where someone had broken into something like 40 buildings, and we had cameras in four of those buildings,” he said. “This was a pro, and he got into a door within four seconds and looked like he used a key.”
To a good thief, sixty seconds is an eternity
That is worth something — having a record of crimes not prevented may nevertheless reduce crime overall because it increases the chances of catching the malefactor.
Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said video from building surveillance cameras could be helpful in criminal investigations, but she also said that buildings should have protocols for when video is released, to protect residents from wrongful disclosure. “The concern is that videotapes might be turned over to government to reveal innocent comings and goings of people that are inappropriately a target — say political opponents, for example,” she said.
Yes, there’s always a tradeoff between privacy and security.
I’m a politician, I can claim there’s no tradeoff at all!
Video images, however, are kept for up to 100 days. Co-op boards have on occasion asked Cyberdoorman to retrieve incriminating video for things of a less than criminal nature, like a broken garage gate, a lobby Christmas tree that kept mysteriously getting moved and “things of a sexual nature happening inside an elevator.”
It happened in one elevator?
What happens in the elevator, stays in the elevator?
Mr. Barcus said that the offender often “winds up being a resident in the building, and if we have to speak to them about it, they’ll say: ‘Wow, I didn’t even know there was a camera there. That was stupid, wasn’t it?’”
In previous eras, the rich were always surrounded by servants, who were expected to keep their eyes open but their mouths shut. That tradition of discreet service is likely to undergo a cyber-revival.
Toby A. Ten Eyck, a sociologist at Michigan State University, said the growing acceptance of virtual-doorman services says something about urban living. “We’re always in crowds in the city,” he said, “so people are always watching us at a certain level. Now technology allows us to have cameras everywhere watching what we do, and what’s interesting is we’ve gotten to the point where we don’t care that we’re being watched. We actually like it.”
Larry Niven, whom I quote now and then, wrote that freedom x security = constant. Maybe not freedom, exactly, but certainly if you want security, you surrender some privacy. The question is, to whom?
Which is why residents can find it reassuring when a virtual doorman they have never met calls them by name and opens the door for them, he said. “It’s the ‘Cheers’ mentality of being somewhere where everybody knows your name,” he said, referring to the television show about a
As to whether virtual doormen can replace real doormen, Ms. Bonet’s husband, Kevin, who is a doorman on
He is quick to add, though, that he has watched his wife at work and is awed by the way she effortlessly monitors up to 17 buildings on four plasma screens.
That’s the real advantage — higher utilization. Many a real doorman spends most of his time available but idle.
Always available to help when you come by
The couple live in a non-doorman building, and when asked if they would rather live in a building with a doorman or a virtual doorman, both voted for the virtual one.
Not surprising — it’s cheaper, and it’s better.
She said she liked the reliability of video surveillance records. And he said, given all the comings and goings he sees, a virtual doorman offers more privacy. “With people watching your door, they tend to know your business more,” he said.
He figures not knowing and not having to face the person behind the camera can be a real plus.
It’s just better.
I may be a dying breed but I can be cheerful about it, can’t I?
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