Describe the building, and we will tell you what the job really is
The form takes about three minutes. Every field on it is there because the answer changes the scope, the price, or whether the work is even permitted. Nothing is collected for a mailing list.
Why each of those questions is on there
None of it is lead-scoring. Each field changes something concrete about the answer you get back.
- Property type, because it decides which law applies. A Class A multiple dwelling of eight or more apartments, erected or converted after 1 January 1968, has a statutory obligation under Multiple Dwelling Law §50-a to provide two-way voice communication and remote door release at a self-locking entrance door. A retail, entertainment or food-and-drink establishment using fingerprint or facial credentials picks up a separate signage duty under NYC Admin Code §22-1201. A private home has neither. Same hardware, entirely different obligations.
- Borough or area, because the rules and the buildings differ. It determines which county licensing regime applies, which code edition governs the electrical work, and whether a landmarked facade is going to constrain what can be mounted at the entrance before anyone talks about hardware.
- Doors or units, because it decides the architecture and the pricing axis. Cloud access control is commonly priced per door in commercial buildings and per unit in multifamily, and on a 200-unit building those two models produce wildly different numbers. On cameras it drives switch capacity, storage and, if anything is going to the cloud, the sustained upload bandwidth the building needs to have.
- What you need, because it tells us who else has to be involved. Anything touching an egress door pulls in a fire alarm interface and an electrician for the lock power feed. A gate operator brings in entrapment protection requirements under UL 325. Knowing that on day one keeps it out of a change order on day thirty.
- The description, because symptoms diagnose and conclusions mislead. “The buzzer sounds but the door does not open” already tells us the signal path is good and the fault is downstream. “We need a new intercom” tells us nothing, and quite often it is not true.
- Phone and email, because they do different jobs. Two minutes on the phone resolves what six emails cannot; documents, drawings, photographs and certificates of insurance need email. We use both and neither goes anywhere else.
- The consent box, because asking is better than assuming. It covers this inquiry and nothing beyond it. There is no newsletter to unsubscribe from because there is no newsletter.
What you will get back, and what you will not
You will get a written reply from a person, usually the same business day. Where the question has a real answer without a site visit (whether a symptom is repairable, whether a piece of equipment is still supported, roughly what a category of work costs in this market, whether the locking arrangement someone has quoted you is even permitted on that door), you will get it in that reply.
You will not get a firm price by email for a building nobody has walked. Not because we are being cagey, but because in a multi-tenant building the single largest cost driver is how many conductors in the existing riser still ring out clean, and that is a measurement rather than an estimate. A number given before that is a guess, and guesses turn into change orders at exactly the moment you have the least leverage.
You will not get a sales sequence either. No drip campaign, no chasing calls, no discount that expires on Friday. If you go quiet, we assume you are busy or you went elsewhere, and both are fine.
If your project is a long way out (a board vote next spring, a capital plan for next year), say so. Early conversations are the cheapest ones, and a scope written now gives a board a real number to plan against instead of a placeholder somebody invented.
Business hours, and what happens if you cannot wait
Forms are read during business hours: Sunday to Thursday, plus Friday morning. There is no overnight monitoring of this inbox and no automated response pretending otherwise.
If a building is locked out right now (a dead entrance panel, a failed door release, an access system that has shut out an entire staff), call rather than fill in a form. Lockouts go to the front of the queue and in most cases that means the same day or the next business day, during business hours. If it genuinely cannot wait until morning, say so and you will get an honest answer about whether we can help or who else to try.
What we do with what you send
Security work involves telling a stranger where your building is weak. That deserves saying out loud rather than burying in a policy nobody reads.
- What you send is used to answer your request. It is not sold, traded, rented or shared with a marketing platform, and it does not get added to a list.
- Site details stay private. No client building, address, floor plan, camera position, door schedule or security weakness appears in any marketing anywhere, on this site or off it, without written permission, and even then, not the parts that would tell somebody how to get in.
- Photographs you send are working documents. They exist to diagnose your problem, not to become a case study.
- We keep it only while there is a reason to. Quotes and job records are retained because warranty and service history need them. Inquiries that go nowhere do not need keeping indefinitely.
- Credentials are yours from day one. Where we install a system, admin accounts are registered in your name, default manufacturer passwords are changed at commissioning, and any support access we hold is visible to you and revocable by you.
The full policy is on the privacy page. If you would rather not put building details into a web form at all, call instead. That is a completely reasonable position and it costs you nothing here.
Common questions
How long does the form actually take, and can I skip fields?
About three minutes if you know the building. The required fields are name, phone, email, property type, area, a description and the consent box. Everything else can be left empty.
The two optional fields are worth filling in anyway. The service checkboxes tell us which other trades a job will pull in, and the door or unit count decides the architecture before anyone discusses products: a twelve-unit walk-up and a 200-unit elevator building are different engineering problems, not the same problem at different sizes.
If you genuinely do not know what you need, tick “not sure yet” and describe the symptom. That is a perfectly normal starting point and it is often the one that leads to a repair instead of a replacement.
Is the survey really free, and is there any obligation after it?
A standard site survey anywhere in the five boroughs, Nassau, Suffolk or Westchester costs nothing and carries no obligation. You get a verbal read on site and a written scope afterwards, and you are free to take that scope, compare it against other bids or shelve it for a year.
What is chargeable is destructive or deep diagnostic work: opening finished walls, dismantling a riser, or a full point-to-point continuity test across a large legacy system. That is real labor and it gets quoted separately before any of it starts, never added afterwards.
Service calls to repair an existing fault are also chargeable labor, at a rate you will be told before anyone comes out.
We need three bids for the board. Are you comfortable with that?
Entirely, and a written scope is designed for exactly that comparison. Boards are usually shown three numbers and no way to tell whether they describe the same job.
Read the documents side by side and look for four things: does each bid name the actual make and model of every device; does it state the cable type and fire listing; does it list the openings individually with the locking and release method for each; and does it name its unknowns with a capped allowance rather than hiding them in a lump sum.
If one bid is dramatically cheaper, the answer is almost always in those four items: a survey that did not happen, a strike rated for a fraction of the cycles that door will see, or general-purpose cable in a riser shaft that requires riser-listed cable. We will happily go through a competing scope with you and point out what is missing, including when the honest answer is that theirs is fine.
Can you give a ballpark before the survey so we can budget?
Yes, as a range with the drivers named, which is different from a quote. Typical New York figures: cameras run roughly $500 to $2,500 each installed; a Cat6 data drop roughly $125 to $400; access control roughly $2,500 to $5,000 per door all-in; multi-tenant intercom hardware roughly $1,000 to $7,000 before labor, with labor swinging enormously on whether the existing riser can be reused.
Those ranges exist so a board can decide whether to have the conversation at all. They are not a commitment and the spread inside each one is real, because the drivers are real: cable route and length, frame construction, firestopping, freight elevator access, board approval cycles and whether an electrician has to be scheduled.
Where budgeting matters most, the survey is the cheapest thing you can do, because it converts a range into a number for free.
Something is broken today. Should I use this form or call?
Call. The form is built for planned work and it is read during business hours; a live fault needs a conversation, and a two-minute call routinely resolves what an email thread cannot.
Have three things ready: the building address, whether the problem affects every apartment or only some, and whether the entrance door has failed locked or failed unlocked. That last one changes the urgency and what gets brought to site.
If it is outside hours, leave a message anyway. It gets picked up first thing and a building nobody can enter goes to the front of the queue rather than into the general list.
Work that usually comes with this
Intercom Installation
New audio or video entry systems, wired or IP, sized to the building.
Access Control Installation
Complete door-control systems, from a single door to a multi-building portfolio.
Security Camera Installation
New IP camera systems for buildings, storefronts, offices and homes.
Structured Cabling
Cat6/6A and fibre backbones, racks, patch panels, certified and labelled.
Still easier to just describe it out loud?
Call during business hours and describe what the building is doing. If it is repairable rather than replaceable, that is what you will be told.
Sun to Thu 9am to 5pm · Fri 9am to 12pm · Sat closed