The board vote is part of the installation schedule.
In a co-op or condo the technical work is rarely the long pole. The alteration agreement, the architect’s review, the paperwork and the meeting calendar are. A scope written without them in mind gets voted down or, worse, approved at the wrong number.
How a board job actually runs
Five stages. Only one of them involves tools, and it is usually the shortest.
Survey and findings, before any number
We walk the vestibule, the lobby, the riser and the machine room, ring out the existing pairs, and photograph what is there. The output is a findings document: what exists, what condition it is in, what can be reused, and what we cannot know until a wall or a panel opens. Boards make better decisions from photographs of their own riser than from a brochure.
A scope the board can vote on
Line items, not a lump sum. Building-wide equipment separated from per-unit equipment. Elective items separated from required ones. Exclusions stated in plain words. Unknowns named as unknowns with a capped allowance and a written trigger, so a change order cannot arrive as a surprise between two meetings.
Alteration agreement and documentation
Most boards will require the work to sit under an alteration agreement with the corporation: scope, hours, protection, deposits and the board’s right to refuse. The managing agent will want a vendor file before anyone is allowed past the service entrance. Expect revisions. Four to eight weeks from board interest to a signed agreement is normal and is not anybody behaving badly.
Shareholder notice, then phased work
Residents get told what changes, when, and what happens in the gap. Work runs inside house-rule hours with hallway protection and daily cleanup, and the cutover is staged so no apartment loses door release overnight. Non-responsive units get repeat attempts, tracked, and reported to the managing agent rather than quietly skipped.
Handover to the building, not to us
Testing done with a board member or the super present, on every door and every station. As-built drawings, a cable labeling map, a door schedule with hardware type, and the administrative account registered in the corporation’s name with the managing agent’s email as owner. Plus a written page on adding and revoking a resident, because the person who will do that in three years is not in the room today.
Why the cheapest proposal usually ends up the most expensive
Three bids on a co-op intercom job rarely price the same job. They price the same equipment, which is not the same thing. The spread is almost never in the hardware (the panels differ by a few thousand dollars across the whole building). It is in what each bidder assumed about your riser, your doors and your access to apartments.
The low bid is usually the one that assumed the existing riser is good, assumed every apartment will open on the first notice, assumed the entrance frame will accept a standard strike, and assumed nothing will be found behind the vestibule panel. Any one of those being false becomes a change order. And a change order in a co-op is not just money: it is a second board discussion, possibly a second vote, and a delay measured in the gap between meetings.
The question that separates the bids is not “what does it cost” but “what did you measure, and what did you assume?” Ask every bidder how many usable conductors are in your riser and how they know. A contractor who has actually rung out the pairs will tell you a number. One who has not will tell you it will be fine.
The second question worth asking is what happens to the price if the assumption is wrong. A capped allowance with a written trigger and an agreed unit rate is a defensible answer. “We’ll deal with it if we find it” is how a $40,000 job becomes a $70,000 job with the board’s approval already spent.
Splitting a job across two fiscal years without paying twice
| Do in year one | Defer to year two | Why this order and not the reverse |
|---|---|---|
| Riser condition work, cable, conduit, back boxes and the vestibule rough-in | In-unit stations, additional readers, camera additions | Cable is the item you cannot revisit cheaply. Opening a pre-war wall twice costs far more than doing all of it in one visit, and in a landmark district it can mean two review cycles instead of one. |
| Entrance door hardware, strike, closer and power supply | Elevator floor restriction, garage or secondary door readers | The entrance is the compliance item and the one residents notice. Secondary doors are additive and genuinely can wait. |
| The management platform and one credential format for the whole building | Re-badging the remaining residents | Multi-technology readers accept old and new credentials at once, so you can run both through a natural turnover cycle and switch the legacy side off later at no extra hardware cost. |
| Lobby and vestibule camera positions with the cable pulled to all of them | The recorder capacity upgrade and any additional cameras | Storage is the easiest thing in the system to add later. Cable routes through a finished pre-war hallway are the hardest. |
| Documentation, labeling and the as-built set | Nothing: this one never defers | An undocumented phase one turns phase two into a rediscovery exercise that you pay for a second time in survey labor. |
Typical shapes only, subject to survey. The governing rule is that anything requiring access to the riser, the facade or every apartment should happen once. The phasing goes around it, not through it.
What belongs in a proposal a board can actually vote on
Boards do not reject good projects. They defer projects they cannot compare, cannot explain to shareholders, or cannot defend if it goes wrong.
- Photographs of your building, not a catalog. The riser as it is, the vestibule as it is, the door frame as it is. A board that can see the cracked cloth insulation in its own basement does not need to be persuaded about why a rewire is on the table.
- Line items, exclusions and a named unknowns section. Every item that could move, what would move it, by how much, and who decides. A proposal with no unknowns section on a pre-war building is not more confident, it is less honest.
- An explicit answer on landmark review. If the building sits in a historic district, anything street-visible (a faceplate, a camera housing, surface conduit, an exterior reader, replacement entry door hardware) needs Landmarks review before a Buildings filing, and the commission cares about the side elevation too on a corner lot. That review is weeks, and it belongs in the schedule rather than in a surprise.
- What happens during an outage. For any cloud or wireless element: what works when the internet is down, when power is out, when the cellular signal fails in the basement. Cached credentials, for how long, and whether residents can still be buzzed in. Get the answer in writing from the vendor before it is specified, not from the salesperson afterwards.
- Who owns the account. The corporation, with the managing agent’s email as owner and named logins for site staff. Not a shared login called “office”, and never the contractor’s account with the building as a guest.
- The disruption plan in shareholder language. Which days, which hours, whether anyone loses door release and for how long, what happens to deliveries, and who to call. This is the section that decides the meeting, and most proposals omit it entirely.
Floor restriction, and the thing nobody mentions about fire service keys
Elevator access control comes up in almost every condo and co-op conversation, and it is the most misquoted integration in this trade. There are two genuinely different approaches and they are not interchangeable.
The relay approach puts a reader in the cab, runs its output down the traveling cable to a controller in the machine room, and wires relays in series with the floor buttons so a credential only enables the floors it is entitled to, for a timed window. It works on almost any elevator. It is also hardware-heavy (on entry-level platforms you are looking at roughly one controller per four controlled stops), and the traveling cable has to have spare conductors, which on an older cab is a real question rather than a formality. The refinement most integrators skip is bringing the floor-button outputs back into the access system as inputs, so the system logs which floor was actually selected and can drop the remaining buttons immediately.
The high-level approach talks to the elevator controller over the network instead, and on a destination-dispatch system there are no cab buttons to wire at all. Architecturally much cleaner. Entirely dependent on the elevator manufacturer’s integration existing, being current, and being licensed. That is a commercial question for your elevator company, and one worth asking before the access system is specified rather than after.
The point nobody raises in the sales meeting: fire service keys are frequently identical across every elevator of the same make and are easy to buy online. Floor restriction that can be bypassed with a $30 key from the internet is decoration. The mitigation is to ask the elevator contractor for a dry contact that closes whenever a car enters fire service mode and monitor it as an input, so at minimum the building knows when it happens and has a timestamp to line up against the lobby camera.
Scope boundary, stated before the proposal
We do not perform fire alarm work, monitored alarm service or line-voltage electrical work, and we do not touch the elevator controller. That is your elevator contractor’s equipment and their liability. On a job that needs any of those, we specify the interface, write it into the scope so the board can see it, and coordinate the sign-off with the trade that holds the right license. A proposal that quietly includes work the contractor is not licensed to do is a problem the building inherits, not the contractor.
Common questions
Realistically, how long from our first conversation to a working system?
For a straightforward building with a usable riser: roughly two to three weeks from survey to a written scope, then whatever your board calendar imposes, then a signed alteration agreement and vendor file, then the install itself, which for a 40 to 80 unit building is usually days rather than weeks if in-unit work is limited.
The variable that dominates everything is the approval layer. Four to eight weeks from board interest to a countersigned alteration agreement is normal once you count architect review, document revisions and the back-and-forth on paperwork. If the building is in a historic district and anything street-visible is changing, add the Landmarks review on top of that.
The way to compress it is to get the survey done early, while the board is still discussing whether to do the project at all. Findings in hand make the decision faster and stop the project restarting when a second bidder produces a different set of assumptions.
Should this come out of reserves or a special assessment?
That is a decision for your board, your managing agent and your accountant, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we can do is shape the scope so the decision is available to you rather than forced.
Practically, that means writing the proposal so it splits cleanly at a defensible line (infrastructure and the entrance in one phase, in-unit equipment and secondary doors in another), with each phase working on its own if the second one is delayed a year. A phase that leaves the building half-functional is not a phase, it is an unfinished job, and we will tell you if a proposed split creates one.
One caution worth having on the record: deferring the cable is almost always false economy in a pre-war building, because the second wall opening costs more than the first and, in a landmark district, may require its own review.
Our building is in a historic district. Can we even change the vestibule panel?
Usually yes, but the sequence matters and the commission is stricter than most boards expect. Anything visible from the street on a designated facade (the entry panel faceplate, a camera housing, surface conduit, an exterior reader, and changes to entry door hardware) needs Landmarks review before a Buildings filing. The two lighter permit paths, a certificate of no effect and a permit for minor work, cover most of what an entry upgrade involves.
Two practical points from doing these. First, on a corner building the side elevation counts as street-visible, which surprises people who assumed only the front mattered. Second, the design decisions that get approved most easily are the ones that keep the new equipment within the existing opening and match the existing finish, rather than adding a larger plate or new surface-mounted raceway. Where a modern panel is physically bigger than the hole it replaces, that difference is the entire conversation, and it is worth resolving on paper before the board votes on a product.
Can shareholders keep their existing fobs?
Often, at least for a transition period, and it is usually worth doing. Multi-technology readers read both legacy proximity credentials and modern encrypted ones, so you can commission the new system with everyone’s existing fob still working, issue new credentials through a natural turnover cycle, and then switch the legacy side off on a date the board sets.
The honest caveat is that you should switch it off. Legacy 125 kHz proximity credentials carry a fixed number in the clear with no encryption; a handheld duplicator that clones one costs about twenty dollars and takes seconds, and consumer kiosks now do it too. Running them indefinitely means the building has spent money on a system whose weakest credential is still a photocopy. Running them for six months while people are re-badged is a reasonable trade; running them for six years is not.
We are changing managing agents. What happens to the system?
Nothing, if it was set up correctly, and quite a lot if it was not. The account should be registered to the corporation as the organization, with an owner-level login the board controls, and separate named logins for the managing agent’s staff and for the super. Changing agents then means removing users, not migrating a system.
The failure mode we see regularly is a platform registered to the previous agent’s corporate account, or to the contractor, with the building as a guest. In that arrangement the building does not own its resident list, cannot export it, and sometimes cannot remove a credential without a phone call to a company it no longer works with. Untangling that after the fact usually means rebuilding the directory by hand.
If you are mid-transition, the useful thing to do this week is log in and check who the owner of record is. It takes two minutes and it is a genuinely common unpleasant surprise.
The managing agent wants three bids. How do we make them comparable?
Issue the same question set to all three rather than the same drawing. The drawing gets interpreted; the questions get answered. The five that separate proposals in practice: how many usable conductors are in the riser and how did you measure it; what happens to the price if that count is wrong; how many in-unit visits are included and what happens if a unit does not answer; what specifically is excluded; and who holds the administrative account at handover.
Then compare the exclusions rather than the totals. In our experience the entire spread between a low bid and a high bid on a co-op entry job is usually visible in the exclusions section, if the low bid has one. If it does not, that is the finding.
It is also fair to ask each bidder which parts of the work they will not be performing themselves, and which licensed trade is doing it. A proposal that includes fire alarm interfacing or line-voltage work without naming who holds that license is a proposal the board should ask about.
Work that usually comes with this
Intercom Replacement & Upgrade
Replacing obsolete systems, including retrofits that reuse existing riser cable.
Video Intercom Systems
See who's at the door: lobby panels with cameras, in-unit monitors and phone apps.
Elevator Access Control
Floor restriction for co-ops, condos and mixed-use buildings.
Mobile & Cloud Access Control
Phone-as-credential systems with browser-based administration and remote unlock.
Apartment Buildings
Walk-ups and elevator buildings, 6 units to 200+, and the law that governs their entry systems.
Property Management
Portfolio work: one vendor, consistent hardware, COIs on file, documented every time.
Get findings before the board meeting, not after.
A survey and a written findings document give your board something concrete to vote on. Tell us the address, the unit count and when your next meeting is.
Sun to Thu 9am to 5pm · Fri 9am to 12pm · Sat closed