Students without keys

Guestcompass opens doors

February 2019 

Housing association De Key and GuestCompass are currently running a pilot with “keyless” doors. Thanks to these electronic door locks, students open the doors of their residential complex and of their own apartment with their smartphone.

Guestcompass & De Key

De Key has been using GuestCompass for several years now for more than 20 residential complexes with 7,000 student apartments. With GuestCompass, De Key provides students with tailor-made important housing information. For example about household waste, facilities and planned maintenance work. But with this pilot, the collaboration goes one step further: with GuestConnect from GuestCompass, student residents can now enter their building and their own apartment without keys.

The Prins Hendrikkade

The De Key complex on the Prins Hendrikkade where this “keyless” pilot is running consists of 130 student apartments. Together, these are good for no less than 2,000 resident changes per year, because these are international students who study in Amsterdam for a relatively short period of time. That means that two key transfers take place on average four times a year! This used to be an incredibly time consuming job. After all, an appointment had to be made for each student on arrival and departure. Thanks to this pilot, that will soon be a thing of the past.

Short stay student and keys

In the complex on the Prins Hendrikkade, GuestCompass initially connected 10 short stay student apartments to the GuestConnect platform. This is a brand-independent authentication platform in which we not only control access to doors, but also offer home automation. Think of lighting, thermostat, energy consumption, curtains open / closed, etc. Because the complex on the Prins Hendrikkade consists of both old buildings and new buildings, we were able to test different situations and locks at the same time. The pilot showed that the keyless system offers many advantages.

Keyless benefits for the student

The students will receive an e-mail with a registration form two weeks before arrival. After registration, the student has direct access to the doors of the complex and their own home. This is clearly visible in the app, because the keys then turn from gray to blue. An additional advantage is that students can see via the app a week before their rental contract expires how long the keys will still function. And students always have their smartphone with them, so they don’t have to worry about forgetting or losing a key.

Keyless management benefits

For the managers of the buildings, the advantages are actually even greater:
– No key issues
– You can see from the office whether students have arrived
– No more drilling cylinders because a key has been lost
– Cleaners get access on cleaning day and do not have to collect keys
– You can see if the cleaner has already been
– Students know exactly when the rental period has ended, something that was often unclear

The Technology behind GuestConnect

The authentication platform GuestConnect can open doors via different protocols. Depending on the situation, we make a choice. For example, front doors in residential complexes often already have an electronic strike plate, with which students can open the front door from their room when someone is at the door. Those front door locks do not need to be replaced, but we connect them to GuestConnect. If many doors have to be connected together in the area, such as the apartment front doors and bedroom doors on the Prins Hendrikkade, we use the KNX protocol. KNX is an open standard for building automation. We use an IoT device (internet of things) for stand-alone doors that need to be opened electronically.

Outcomes of the keyless pilot

The pilot has now been running for eight months and is a great success. The technology works well, students are satisfied with the convenience and administrators indicate that they spend much less time on questions and arranging. As a next step, we are now going to make four existing residential towers and a new residential complex to be built keyless!

Feel free to mail or call us if you want more information or are also interested in a pilot. We are happy to tell you more about the keyless options, but also about the home automation solutions.