How remote video monitoring cut costs for Fifth Street Management

About Fifth Street Management

Fifth Street Management is a commercial real estate management company based in Atlanta. At the property covered in this case study, Fifth Street manages two office buildings and an adjoining parking structure totaling 600,000 square feet.

The challenge

Fifth Street Management relied on a guard service to secure its two buildings and the adjoining parking structure. Leadership understood the inherent limitations of a traditional guard program and was open to changes that could strengthen security around the properties.

“It is our practice to continually look to technology as a way to improve the service we provide our tenants,” says George Lipscomb, COO for Fifth Street Management. “We felt that there had to be a smarter approach to provide more effective security at a lower cost.”

The solution

Kastle began with a security audit of the Fifth Street properties, surveying the area extensively and working with Fifth Street to understand the specific challenges at each building. The two companies then defined customized security rules for each sector of the property, since a rule against loitering in a lobby calls for different parameters than a rule against loitering outside a back door after hours.

“I was impressed by the thoroughness with which Kastle analyzed and designed our solution,” says Chris McCall, Senior Property Manager at Fifth Street. “They spent a lot of time with us to understand our goals and develop solutions to address them.”

Kastle then installed a smart video system that turned Fifth Street’s existing surveillance cameras into proactive sensors, using advanced analytics to detect security incidents on their own. The resulting remote video monitoring service runs 24 hours a day under Kastle’s management, watching for pre-defined, unauthorized activity such as loitering, removing an object, leaving an object behind, or tailgating through an entrance. When a camera detects a breach, it sends an alert straight to the Kastle Operations Center, where a security expert notifies an on-site guard to address the situation directly.

The outcome

The results were immediate. In a typical week, the system detects an average of 64 security events, and roughly 91 percent of those are incidents a guard patrol almost certainly would have missed on its own.

The shift has changed what Fifth Street’s security staff spend their time doing, moving them from trying to spot problems to acting on alerts that are already verified, which has allowed the property to reduce guard hours. Combined with the lower cost of the monitoring service itself, the changes have saved Fifth Street 7 cents per square foot.