As with any bustling real estate office, a steady stream of visitors, agents and staff come and go throughout the day. Additionally, they don’t always work traditional hours.  With a substantial number of agents and many more staff across five communities, Calcagni Real Estate faced the challenge of providing streamlined access to these sites without constantly issuing keys and attempting to keep track of them.

Travelling throughout the state, agents often require the ability to work from a number of the company’s locations, needing multiple keys for access or having to navigate the added challenge of contacting others to open the building for them after hours. A lock-and-key system became cumbersome and hard to manage for each of these facilities, necessitating a different avenue for increased efficiency.

A longtime customer of integrator and alarm monitoring provider American Total Protection (ATP), Calcagni considered cloud-based access control a couple of years prior. “When we first looked at updating the access control system, mobile credentials weren’t an option, but over the last two years, they’ve become more mainstream, which was appealing to the leadership at Calcagni,” said Joe Montini, President of Integration, ATP.

The use of mobile credentials fell in line with the real estate’s top priority of leveraging innovation and convenience to improve the experience for all involved. 

The new Vanderbilt ACT365 solution enables Calcagni to remotely manage entry to its facilities from any device at any time and without the need for a dedicated IT department, giving the team the ability to deploy a robust security solution while saving money on significant infrastructure investments. ACT365 is a cost-effective option for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with multiple locations with a number of access readers and users. Often, these organisations lack the infrastructure and manpower and so automatic updates and remote management can save on time and resources.

ACT365 is integrated with Farpointe Conekt Readers, which read data from mobile credentials stored in a smartphone’s wallet app via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology, allowing an agent’s smartphone to function as a contactless electronic access control credential. The readers communicate with ACT365 to provide real-time situational awareness to the Calcagni team, along with the ability to grant and restrict access to a door at any given time.

ACT365 was instrumental in simplifying access to the five office locations, allowing a single user the ability to manage the system in terms of schedules, onboarding and controlling access levels. ACT365 also offers Calcagni’s IT Development Director Heather Harwood the ability to streamline the addition of new cardholders to the system, which is significantly easier than having to issue and keep track of keys on a regular basis. Management of the system can also be spearheaded from either a web-based browser or a mobile application.

“We’ve discovered that with the installation of the new readers and the ACT365 solution, our facilities are more secure, and our agents have more flexibility with their schedules,” said Antonio Liguori, CFO, Calcagni Real Estate. 

“Mobile credential use is on the rise in many of today’s SMBs as a way to remove the burden of key cards or a lock-and-key distribution, while embracing the power of smartphone technology,” said Thomas Piston, Eastern Regional Sales Manager, Farpointe Data. “For professional services companies, like Calcagni, this is an ideal solution because of the ability of agents and staff to come and go as they please by simply using a device they carry with them at all times.”

The functionality and reliability of the system provide Calcagni Real Estate with the flexibility it requires and the ability to scale as the company grows. “ATP and the Vanderbilt support team have been helpful in addressing our unique needs and requests, and it helps that Vanderbilt has been a manufacturer with a proven track record and reputation of being forward thinking,” Liguori said.