Mixed use development is a growing trend in the commercial real estate market. By incorporating residential, office and retail spaces, developers are able to create diverse and highly desirable properties for people to both live and work.
The surveillance needs for these properties are also diverse, especially since these developments need to take into account monitoring expansive parking garages. Another challenge is that property managers need to be able to actively monitor non-residents during daytime hours as they shop, visit restaurants or walk to their offices, and residents when they frequent the property at all hours of the day.
How can property managers effectively use their surveillance system to monitor these changing areas of interest without having to rely on an administrator to reconfigure the entire video management system?
Leveraging custom views
Video surveillance is considered a dynamic security tool, because it is actively surveying an area at all times. Still, it can easily become stagnant if it is not monitoring the right area. This challenge occurs when one area becomes more important to monitor as the day progresses.
For example, mixed use developments may have multiple parking areas, from surface lots to large, expansive parking garages. Due to increasing vandalism or theft in one of the parking locations, commercial property managers may need to shift their camera resources to have more views on a specific parking area.
This is where custom views come into play. It allows property managers and security officers to view select cameras through their video management system, without requiring an administrator or security integrator to set up that view point.
Through custom views, cameras located within a specific parking garage can be compiled together to show only those cameras that monitor garage entrances. Once the view is created, video operators can easily leverage this capability as needed or switch back to another custom view when the security threat in the parking garage returns to normal.
In another scenario, commercial property managers might want more surveillance visibility of people walking around the exterior of the property or in the parking lots during daytime hours, but at night the need shifts to more closely monitor the entrances to parking garages.
Operators can easily set up custom views for monitoring at specific times or days of the week so that during the evening hours security personnel can readily access video showing those specific areas of interest.
Using custom views for tenants
Beyond shifting the views to more actively monitor certain areas at different times of the day, custom views can also provide valuable business intelligence to tenants in mixed-use properties.
This can prove especially helpful for a restaurant that is considering leasing space in a mixed-use property. A prospective tenant might want to better understand the foot traffic volume on the weekend, compared to during the week when office workers are frequenting the building.
Property managers may also want to have more eyes on pedestrian areas during the day, when foot traffic greatly increases along sidewalks, outside storefronts or in crosswalks.
Surveillance and VMS systems are more dynamic today than ever before. By leveraging custom view capabilities, property managers can make sure that security officers are actively monitoring critical areas of the property, even as the priority areas shift.
