In Queens, one house is four separate doors

Usually two at the front door and one at the basement entrance, but the honest answer depends on how the households come and go. If the basement tenant enters from the side and never uses the front steps, a front-door button for them is decoration; what they need is a station at the door they use, with video, and a release they can operate from inside.

The other half of the question is the credential list. Two units means two groups, so a lease ending upstairs does not require you to change anything downstairs or reprogram your own fob. If there is a driveway door or a garage, decide deliberately whether the tenant’s credential opens them. Most owners say no, and most systems as installed say yes because nobody was asked.

Almost certainly not, and this is worth understanding rather than just accepting. Any door in an egress path has to allow free mechanical exit (a lever or a push bar) no matter what the power is doing. Magnetic locks hold only while energized, so they must be fail-safe and they must release on power loss and on fire alarm, and they require a clearly labeled push-to-exit button within five feet of the door, mounted around 40 to 48 inches up, that cuts lock power independently of every other piece of electronics and keeps the door unlocked for at least thirty seconds.

On a fire-rated door the calculus reverses: hardware there has to be fail-secure and listed for the assembly, because a lock that unlatches on power loss destroys the rating the door exists to provide. In a converted cellar entrance the right answer is nearly always an electric strike working with the existing lever set, so the door is controlled from outside and free to open from inside at all times. If a scope you have been given puts a maglock on that door with no release button, that is the part to question.

In clusters, not in one run. Power over Ethernet stops at 328 feet of cable, which on a multi-acre garden campus means local equipment serving the entrances near it, tied back over a fiber backbone, with the whole property administered as one credential list in a browser.

The advantages of doing it that way show up at turnover rather than at install. A new shareholder or a new tenant is added once and works at whichever entrances the board says they should, and the directory is edited on screen instead of a technician re-lettering thirty lobby panels. What we will flag at survey is which of your buildings have usable pathways between them and which will need trenching or aerial routing, because that, not the hardware, is where the money on a campus job actually goes.

The low-voltage side of the work (the reader, the keypad, the intercom, the loop or beam detection, the control wiring) is generally exempt from permit as signaling and communication circuits under 50 volts, with specific exceptions including anything tied to life safety or interfacing with circuits that switch light, heat or power. The gate operator’s line-voltage supply is a different matter: that is electrical work, it belongs to a licensed electrician, and it is not something we do.

Separate from permits, the gate structure itself, any change to a curb cut, and setback and sight-line questions are governed by the Buildings Department and by zoning. We tell you plainly which parts of your project we handle, which parts need another trade, and what we need from them before we can commission the gate.

Yes: Far Rockaway, Arverne, Rockaway Beach, Rockaway Park, Belle Harbor, Neponsit, Breezy Point and Broad Channel. Two practical notes for that end of the borough.

First, we schedule peninsula work in batches, so a small job may be booked for the week we already have something out there rather than as a one-off run down the Belt. Second, the salt air is a real specification item, not a talking point: exterior stainless has to be the right grade, gaskets and drip loops matter, and any enclosure that will sit in wind-driven spray needs a rating that reflects it. Hardware chosen for an inland driveway comes back rusted in two seasons out there.