Sector
Real estate
You will hand this building over and stop being responsible for it. The systems will not stop being yours in the buyer's mind. We design and maintain security, fire and building systems for residential and commercial developments in Mumbai, specified so that what you hand over still works in the second year. When the society is running it and you are not.
The systems you install are inspected once at handover and then judged for twenty years by a society that did not choose them. Most developer security specifications are commissioned correctly and integrated never, and the gap surfaces in year two, with your name attached to it. We design, document and hand over systems that survive the transfer.
What actually goes wrong
Everything works on handover day. That is the only day it is tested.
| What fails | Why it fails | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Outdoor cameras fogged or dead after two monsoons | Indoor-rated housings fitted outdoors, or glands and drip loops never installed. | The perimeter, the gate and the podium are the first to go, and they are the ones a society actually asks about. |
| Security guards who left still have access | Cards issued to the agency, not to a person. The agency changed staff and nobody told anybody. | Guards from an agency you no longer use still open your doors. Nobody knows how many. |
| The reception camera has been down for months | It is the one camera nobody looks at, because somebody is always sitting there. | A delivery boy walks in and out with no photograph of him. The one camera that sees every visitor sees nothing. |
| The car park is covered from the wrong height | Cameras aimed at bays, so every face is in profile or behind a pillar. | Excellent footage of a car. No usable image of anybody near it. |
| The society inherits a system nobody explained | Handover is a set of keys and a folder. No training, no walkthrough, no named contact. | Within a year they call whoever answers, and it is rarely the person who installed it. |
| The contractor disappears at defect liability end | The relationship was with the project, not with the building. | Year two arrives and nobody has any record of what was installed. |
The thing that outlives your involvement
Your defect liability period ends. Your name on the building does not.
Two years after handover, a resident asks for footage of an incident in the car park and it is not there. Nobody in that society knows who installed the system, who configured it, or who to call. They know one name: yours.
And these are not tenants who write a complaint and wait. The people who bought in your building are the people you sold it to: promoters, partners, senior executives, families who chose this address deliberately. They do not accept the vendor is not responding. They call you, or they call somebody who knows you, and the conversation happens whether you are in it or not.
The systems were correct on the day you handed them over. What was never handed over was the ability to keep them correct.
Check what my last handover actually left behindWhat we carry here
- Surveillance
- Entry, lobbies, lifts, car park levels, perimeter
- Retention specified for a society's actual needs, not the minimum that passes
- Health monitoring the society can read without an engineer
- Access control
- Residents, staff, visitors and contractors as separate groups
- A system a society committee can administer without a specialist
- Records that survive a change of managing committee
- Fire & life safety
- Detection, alarm, evacuation and interlocks documented for the occupancy certificate and for the years after it
- Zone charts that match the building as built
- Test records handed over as a schedule, not as a one-time certificate
- Building management
- Lift interlocks, pressurisation, dampers, common-area services
- Tied to the fire panel and witnessed as a numbered line item
- The part of handover most often listed and least often tested
AV is specified per project where a clubhouse or common room requires it.
The same six stages
A development has all six stages and hands over all six at once.
- 01 Outside the gate Visitor and resident vehicles arriving at the same point. If this is wrong, the guard becomes the bottleneck and the gate stays open.
- 02 Entry The gate, the lobby door, and the service entrance. Three decisions usually made by three different contractors.
- 03 Inside the building Lobbies, lifts, car park levels, stairwells. Car parks are where residential incidents actually happen and where coverage is usually thinnest.
- 04 Who goes where Residents, domestic staff, drivers, contractors, delivery. Five groups, and most handovers give all of them the same credential.
- 05 Work areas Common areas, plant rooms, and the fire strategy for a building where people sleep.
- 06 Control room The security desk in the lobby. Whether it can see anything, and whether anybody has looked at a report since handover.
Proof
The specification was written for one building. The budget was set for another.
A residential development, four towers, tendered on a drawing that described a system nobody had priced. What arrived was the version that fit the number. Housings not rated for the exposure they were mounted in, doors reporting secure that had never been tested against their own frames, and a handover with no cause-and-effect matrix because nobody's scope included writing one.
Two monsoons later the cameras on the exposed elevations had fogged, and the first anybody knew was a request for footage.
Nothing here was anybody's mistake. It was the gap between the drawing and the number, and that gap is decided at tender.
Year seven
The system you handed over is being maintained by a committee that changes every two years.
A society has no facility manager. It has a managing committee of residents who took the role for a term, and the person who understood the security system was on the previous one.
Nothing is neglected deliberately. The knowledge simply leaves with each committee, and by year four nobody remembers what was installed, what the AMC covers, or which contractor to call. The system runs until it does not, and then it stays broken while three quotations are collected.
This is the building your name is on, five years after you stopped being involved.
Find out what your last handover actually left behind.
We assess a development you have already handed over (every camera, panel, reader and interlock) verify it against what was specified, and give you a signed condition report. Useful before the society finds it, and useful before your next project repeats it.
The assessment is chargeable, quoted against the site, and adjusted in full against the first year if you take cover. Where cover is not taken, the fee covers our team’s time on site and the report we leave behind, and the report is yours either way.
Chargeable, and adjusted in full if you take cover.
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