One credential, 54 buildings: how KastlePresence® brought keyless entry to Rose Hill Apartments

About Rose Hill of Alexandria Apartments

Rose Hill of Alexandria Apartments is a 54-building, low-rise, garden-style apartment community in Alexandria, Virginia, less than 10 miles from Washington, D.C. Open lawns, playgrounds, landscaping, and pathways connect the buildings across a single piece of property. The community is managed by A.J. Dwoskin & Associates, Inc., a real estate company that also uses KastleVideo® at several of its retail locations.

The challenge

The sprawling, garden-style layout that makes Rose Hill appealing to residents also made keyless entry a persistent problem. Installing access control across dozens of separate low-rise buildings is typically too costly and too difficult, and most access control providers will not take on the work at all.

A.J. Dwoskin & Associates had wanted to bring hands-free access control to Rose Hill for years, after adopting KastleVideo at several of its retail properties. What the company needed, though, was a platform that could unify every building on the property under one system, without the installation cost and complexity that had ruled out other providers.

The solution

Kastle configured KastlePresence, a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) credentialing platform, to network all 54 of Rose Hill’s buildings under a single institution. Instead of physical keys, residents use the Bluetooth technology already in their smartphones to access their own units and the property’s shared spaces, and they can remotely unlock doors for visitors without being on site.

The platform also gives Rose Hill’s property manager an electronic record of building activity, showing exactly who is entering and exiting, and letting staff remotely assist any resident who gets locked out.

The outcome

KastlePresence now secures Rose Hill’s base buildings and common spaces, not just individual units, giving residents around-the-clock protection and giving management a level of visibility the property never had before. Residents have embraced the technology itself. “Residents think it’s cool to use their devices to open the door for their guests,” a spokesperson for A.J. Dwoskin & Associates says.

For A.J. Dwoskin & Associates, the investment reflects a broader commitment to resident safety. “It proves to residents that when it comes to their safety, we’ve thought of everything,” the spokesperson says.