Landlords: You Have No Idea How Many Copies Of Your Key Are Out There. Nobody Does. Landlords: An Alarm Contract Costs You 300 Euros A Year To Be Told Nothing. Landlords: Stop Handing Over Keys. Start Knowing When Somebody Walks In.
Who this is for
- Anyone who lets a property, long term or short
- Anyone who has handed over a key and not got it back
- Anyone paying every month for an alarm that has never told them anything
- Anyone with a second home, a holiday flat or a place standing empty
Count the keys to your rental. Not the ones in your drawer. All of them.
The tenant. The tenant before that one. The cleaner. The builder who did the bathroom. The agent. Whoever owned it before you.
Any one of them could have cut a copy at a market stall for two euros. A key does not tell you when it has been copied. That is the whole problem with keys, and it has never been fixed.
So I stopped handing them out. Here is what I use instead, and what it cost.
A monitored alarm runs 20 to 40 euros a month. Call it 300 euros a year, every year, for as long as you own the place.
For that it rings a call centre when a door opens. It does not tell you who. It does not tell you whether anybody stayed. And it keeps billing you whether it ever goes off or not.
I wanted two things instead. Nobody holding a key to my flat. And a message on my phone if somebody is inside it.
Both of those turned out to cost less, once, than one year of the contract.
There are only two things a landlord actually wants to know about their front door.
Who can open it. And whether anybody is in there right now.
A key answers neither. It opens for anybody holding it, it never says who used it, and once it is out of your hand you have no idea how many of it exist.
Here is what I replaced mine with.
A key is a password that never expires, cannot be changed without a locksmith, and never tells you who used it.
- Every key you have handed over is still out there. Copies cost two euros and leave no trace.
- Changing the lock properly costs 80 to 150 euros, so almost nobody does it between tenants.
- A monitored alarm is 240 to 480 euros a year, forever, and still cannot tell you who opened your door.
- Codes instead of keys, plus a sensor that knows when a room is in use, does both. Paid once. No monthly fee.
Every key you ever handed over still works
This is the part landlords do not like thinking about, so we mostly do not.
You gave a key to a tenant three years ago. They gave it back. Did they give back the copy? Did they make one? You cannot know, and neither can the lock.
Read those together and you can see why nobody changes the lock.
It costs more than the deposit is worth arguing about, it needs a locksmith and a free afternoon, and you have to do it again after the next tenant. So the honest answer is that most rented flats in Europe are opened by a key with an unknown number of copies.
Nobody changes the lock because it is expensive and annoying. So the keys just keep accumulating.
What a code does that a key cannot
Swap the cylinder for a lock that opens on codes and the whole problem changes shape.
That is one ordinary day at one flat. Four different people went through that door. Not one of them was ever handed a key, and every one of them shows up in the log by name.
The second question. Is anybody in there?
Knowing who opened the door is half of it. The other half is knowing whether somebody is still inside.
An empty property is the one you worry about. The flat between tenants. The holiday place in February. The house your parents left you that nobody has been to since April.
You want one thing from it: tell me if somebody is in there.
That is a real night at my flat. Somebody was inside from 23:10 to 03:40, on a week when the place was supposed to be empty.
I found out at 23:12, because my phone buzzed. Not in April, when I next drove over.
The three things landlords buy instead, and why I stopped
I tried all of these first. In this order, over about eighteen months.
A monitored alarm contract
You rent it forever and it tells you almost nothing. Twenty to forty euros a month. It knows a door opened. It does not know who, and it does not know whether anybody stayed. Cancel and you keep nothing, because the box on the wall was never yours.
An indoor camera
You are not allowed one, and you would not want the footage anyway. Airbnb has banned indoor cameras in listings since April 2024, and EU privacy law does not let you film paying tenants or guests at all. There is more on this below, because most landlords have not been told.
A lockbox with a spare key
It turns one key into a permanent password. The code gets set once and then shared for years, by tenants, by cleaners, by anybody who photographed the box on the wall. And it still puts a real key in a real stranger's hand.
The camera one deserves a straight answer
Most landlords still think an indoor camera is a grey area. It is not, and there are two separate reasons.
If you let on a platform
Every indoor camera, banned since April 2024Not just badly placed ones. Not just hidden ones. All of them, anywhere inside a listing, even switched off. Break it and you can lose the listing.
Whoever you let to
Privacy law does not cover a flat you letYou may film your own home. Letting is a business, so that cover stops. Your tenants and guests are paying customers who expect privacy. Filming them without asking breaks the law, not a house rule.
The second one is the important one, and it applies whether you let for a weekend or for three years. It is not a platform rule you might get away with breaking. It is the law.
You cannot watch your property. You are allowed to know it is being used. Those are different questions, and only one of them needed a camera.
How it knows, without a camera
The sensor uses radar, not a lens. That one difference is why it is allowed.
An ordinary motion sensor looks for movement. The moment everyone sits still, it stops seeing them. Radar does not. It reads the room and finds a body in it, even one sitting still on a sofa.
It reports one thing. This room is in use, or it is not. There is nothing else in the record.
No picture. No sound. Nothing recorded of any person. Nothing to watch back, nothing to leak, nothing that identifies anybody. That is why it stays on the right side of the rules and the law.
Be clear about what it does not do
What it gives you
That the room was in use, and whenA record with times on it, and a message while it is still happening. The two things a key never gave you.
What it does not
It does not count peopleIt will not tell you there were eleven rather than four, and it does not know who any of them are. Anybody selling you a headcount inside somebody's home is selling you a problem.
You still have to declare it. Mine is named in the tenancy pack and in the house manual. In fourteen months not one person has mentioned it. Rules differ by country and they change, so check what applies where you let.
And there is no monthly bill
This is the part that decided it for me.
The rules run on the devices themselves, in the flat. There is no control room, no contract and no renewal. If the internet drops, the lock still opens on its codes and the sensor still switches the plugs. What you lose is the message, not the flat.
One alarm contract at 25 euros a month costs 300 a year, forever. This is 289 once.
And the empty flat starts paying for it
There is a third thing, and it is the one that quietly covers the cost.
A rental sits empty a lot. Between tenants, between bookings, all of February. And whatever was left switched on stays switched on.
Two smart plugs come with the kit. They cut the heating or the cooling when the sensor says the place is empty, and switch it back on before anybody walks in.
On a short let, a flat empty a hundred nights a year with the air conditioning left running is roughly 220 to 370 euros a year at EU average prices. Not a disaster. Just invisible, which is worse.
What this actually is
LOQED Touch 2SOne code per person, ends when you say
Shelly Presence Gen4Radar. Knows when somebody is inside
Shelly Plug M Gen3 ×2Cut the heating when nobody is in
The sensor and the plugs are made by Shelly. The lock is made by LOQED and sold by Shelly.
Amazon Alexa
Google Home
Apple Home
SmartThings
Home Assistant
Homebridge
openHAB
Domoticz
MQTTSpeaks Matter, Zigbee 3.0, Z-Wave, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, so it also joins hubs and systems not listed here.
Nothing here is wired in and none of it needs an electrician. One caveat worth more than the spec sheet: the lock mounts over an existing euro cylinder, so check your door before you order rather than after.
What it is costing you
The lock change assumes one door and one tenancy. If you have three flats, multiply it. The energy line uses EU average prices and a flat empty 85 to 140 nights; in Germany the same empty flat costs about a third more to cool than the table says.
Nobody gets a key. The two smart plugs are on us.
The lock and the sensor are the kit. The Shelly Plug M Gen3 two pack, worth 19.90 EUR, is added free for readers of this page. The whole order is 289 EUR against 338.70 bought separately. Paid once, against 600 to 820 in year one doing it the usual way, and the hardware is yours.
Free delivery over 79 EUR. The Plug M two pack is added to the order at no cost.
Everything together, 289 EUR, paid once
A monitored alarm at 25 EUR a month is 300 a year, every year, and you own nothing at the end. This is 289 EUR once, against 338.70 bought separately, and the hardware is yours.
Free delivery over 79 EUR. The Plug M two pack is added to the order at no cost.
The three together, for 289 EUR
Bought individually they come to 338.70 EUR. As an introductory kit for readers of this page they are 289 EUR, with the Plug M two pack included and free delivery.
Free delivery over 79 EUR. The Plug M two pack is added to the order at no cost.
One property, covered, 289 EUR
The door, the record of who came in, and the heating in an empty flat. One order, nothing left to work out afterwards. 289 EUR against 338.70 bought separately, delivery free.
Free delivery over 79 EUR. The Plug M two pack is added to the order at no cost.
What buyers actually say
"The Presence Gen 4 is fast and accurate, the interface is convenient."
"Throw away all motion detectors in home and now use only presence detectors. Setup not easy, because I never used that kind of detectors. But after few hours experiments now I make scenes in few minutes."
"After one month of use, I can say that the LOQED lock works consistently and reliably."
"Exactly as it was supposed to work. It's very small too so I managed to squeeze it in my switch box."
"Great smart plug. It works very well."
"+ price + great app - a bit complicated installation"
Four stars and below are left in. The most common complaint on this hardware is the app on your first device, not the hardware itself, and you would find that out on the product page anyway.
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