As the holiday season is approaching, multifamily housing properties may see an influx of safety risks and increased traffic from resident guests. While the holidays are an exciting time for all, it is important to keep your properties safe and secure for the sake of all residents, staff, and guests.
What can you do to ensure this level of safety? Let’s take a look at some areas of your properties to monitor more closely during the holiday season.
Interior Property Safety
Fire Safety
Many units are beautifully decorated for the holiday season with everything from Christmas trees to Hannukah menorahs – BUT this creates a significantly increased potential risk for fires. While these decorations bring the holiday spirit into your resident’s units, they pose fire risks due to open flames, overloaded outlets, and improperly connected extension cords.
Many residents may also be cooking more—entertaining guests with multi-course meals—and even increasing the use of scented candles to really get into the spirit. It’s in the best interest of all to ensure that smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors are running properly, fire extinguishers are readily available, and residents are reminded of these increased risks.
Supplier partner Cintas has a fire protection program that can get you ready for the worst with ease. While you may already have the necessary items like sprinklers and fire extinguishers, Cintas is there to inspect your equipment and make sure it is in pristine condition to operate properly during an emergency.
Increased Elevator Usage
The holiday season also means more errands to be run and more entertaining being done within the units on your property. If you have elevators, this is a great time to do a quick maintenance check and ensure they are all running properly. Elevator downtime can cause your residents to become unhappy and delay their plans.
Elevators and vertical transportation products and solutions are available to multifamily housing members on a unique program through OMNIA Partners. With a nationwide team of dedicated vertical transportation professionals, KONE can assist with all your service, repair, and modernization needs.
Increased Package Deliveries
The holiday season is very well known for creating an increase in package delivery. Many residents will be ordering gifts and having them sent to their unit or the main office of your properties. Ensuring you have the right system in place to manage this process, especially with the increased volume, will be very important to resident satisfaction and safety.
Increased deliveries often lead to packages being misplaced, lost, or even stolen. In addition to personal orders, residents will be receiving gifts mailed to them from others, also adding to the volume. On top of that, once the main gift-giving weeks are over, return and exchange packages will fill your hallways, front doors, and main office space.
Exterior Property Safety
Resident and Guest Safety
Residents will likely have more visitors and come and go from the property, frequently running errands and being out and about. It is wise to ensure that your security systems are working properly to keep residents, staff, and visitors safe. We suggest checking and updating any security systems and procedures, all locks, exterior lighting in parking lots/garages and along walkways, and interior lighting in hallways, common spaces, and individual units. Also, for those in the colder regions, make sure to have cleared, treated parking lots, walkways, and sidewalks, as winter weather can pose endless increased risks to safe property maintenance.
Pulsar Alarm Systems has been providing quality fire alarm, sprinkler and security services since 1974. With this amount of Industry knowledge, you know you are receiving a quality product. Pulsar can help you ensure your residents are safe this holiday season!
Waste Management
With increased guests and gatherings comes increased trash. More food is being made and presents are being unwrapped, so your property needs to be ready for the higher volume of trash.
Working with OMNIA Partners, Republic Services offers leading recycling and waste services. Their modern fleet of collection vehicles, use of renewable energy, extensive sustainable landfill network and recycling services are some of the ways they are working to make things easy for you and better for the Earth.
Group Purchasing Strategy for Multifamily Housing
Resident, staff, and visitor safety should be top of mind at all times, but even more so during the holiday season. Partnering with a group purchasing organization (GPO) helps you purchase the products and solutions you need to have a smooth and safe holiday season.
- TAGS:
- Procurement
- , Real Estate