These are the questions Bed-Stuy families, owners and shopkeepers raise before a keyless lock goes on, grouped by the situation behind them: houses passing between generations, empty houses, landmarked rows, shared foyers and back doors. Booking and visit details sit in the FAQ further down. Nothing here is legal advice; where a law, a city office or a court process matters, we name it so you can follow it up with your own lawyer.
Houses passing between generations
Our late mother’s brownstone is empty while the estate goes through Surrogate’s Court — what should happen to the keys and codes right now?
Take stock first, then close every route you cannot account for. Most family houses in Bed-Stuy have keys in more hands than anyone remembers: past tenants, home attendants, neighbours who watered plants, cousins who stayed for a summer, contractors from years ago. The safest assumption on the day the house becomes empty is that some of those keys still work. So we start by asking the family to list everyone they know held a key or code, then we change or retire every mechanical cylinder on every exterior door — parlour door, vestibule door, garden door, rear door, cellar — so that none of those old keys open anything.
Then the house needs one clearly named custodian. That is usually the person the family expects to be appointed executor or administrator, or the relative who lives nearest and has agreed to look after it. That person holds the admin account on the smart lock, a second family member is added as a backup admin, and everyone else who genuinely needs access — a sibling who checks the mail, a cleaner, a surveyor — receives a personal code that can be removed without affecting anyone else. The Attorney General’s deed-theft guidance tells owners not to abandon a property and to “ask someone else to look after it”; a custodian with a working, logged lock is how that looks in practice.
Two things we do not do. We do not decide who in the family is entitled to the house — that is for the court and your lawyer. And we do not change locks on a house where someone is currently living without that person’s agreement or a court order, even if the family believes they have no right to be there. If you are unsure whether anyone is staying in the house, tell us; we will look before we work.
Several of us inherited the house and none of us lives there — whose phone should hold the admin account?
Never just one phone. An admin account is the power to add and delete everyone else, so in a house owned by several heirs it should behave like a joint bank account: two named administrators, ideally from different branches of the family, each able to act if the other is unreachable, and neither able to quietly lock the other out without it showing in the history. Most current smart-lock apps let the owner invite at least one further person with full or near-full rights; we set both up, test both, and write down which email address each account sits on.
Below the administrators, every heir gets an individual credential rather than a shared family code. That matters more than it sounds. When an inherited house becomes contested — and the Center for NYC Neighborhoods counts roughly 350 lawsuits a year across the city over homes in inherited-ownership disputes — the first argument is often about who went in, when, and what they took. A shared code answers none of that. Personal codes, with an entry log that shows which one opened the door, answer most of it.
Finally, agree in writing, before the lock is fitted, what the administrators may and may not do: add a contractor for a fixed week, yes; remove another heir, only with notice to all of them. We leave a one-page access register with the names, credentials and dates so that the agreement and the lock’s settings match.
How can a lock’s entry history help show that nobody was let into an empty house without the family’s say-so?
An entry history is a timeline: this door, this credential, this date and time, locked or unlocked. On an empty house it does two jobs. While nothing happens, it is a quiet record that the house has been secured and visited only by the people the family authorised. When something does happen — a door found unlocked, a stranger claiming they were given permission to stay — it shows which credential opened the door, or that none did and the entry was forced.
To make that history worth something, set the lock up properly from the start. Each person has their own code; no code is ever shared. The lock is connected, so events reach the cloud and the family’s phones rather than sitting only in the lock’s memory. Notifications go to at least two people. And someone exports or screenshots the history regularly, because app histories are not kept forever and a record you can produce months later is better than one that has rolled off the end.
Be realistic about its limits. A lock log does not prove who owns the house, and it will not stop a fraudulent deed being recorded at the City Register. For that, the city’s Mayor’s Office of Deed Theft Prevention offers free property and deed alerts through ACRIS, so the owner of record is told when documents are filed against the property. The lock covers the door; the alert covers the paperwork. In Bed-Stuy we recommend both.
We found someone living in our relative’s vacant house — can we just change the code or the lock?
Do not try, and do not ask us to. The law here moved in 2024: the state budget signed that April changed the definition so that a tenant does not include a squatter, and further bills have been introduced since. But how a particular occupant is treated still depends on facts a court or the police will weigh — how they got in, how long they have been there, what paperwork they hold. Fox 5 New York reported a Queens case in which the homeowner herself was arrested when she tried to change the locks on people occupying her house. New York City’s Administrative Code makes it unlawful to change the lock on an occupant of 30 or more days without supplying them a key, and those rules are enforced first and argued about later.
So the order is: call 911 if anyone is in danger or you believe a break-in is in progress; call the local precinct — Bed-Stuy is covered by the 79th and the 81st — to report the occupation; contact a lawyer, the Attorney General’s Homeowner Protection Program or the city’s deed-theft hotline; and gather any record you have of the house being secured and empty, including a lock’s entry history if one was fitted. If the occupant is in housing court claiming the house through a transfer you believe was fraudulent, the Attorney General notes you can ask the judge to pause the case for 90 days while ownership is challenged in the right court.
Our part comes afterwards, once the house is lawfully back in the family’s hands: re-securing every door the same day, fitting a monitored lock so the next attempt is noticed in minutes rather than months, and leaving you with a written register of who can get in. This is the strongest argument we know for fitting a connected lock the week a family house becomes empty, not after something goes wrong.
People keep knocking with offers to “help” with the house — how should an older owner decide who gets the door opened?
Start from the habit that protects most: do not open the door to talk business. NPR’s reporting on deed theft in Bed-Stuy described scammers who knock, phone, leave leaflets or approach through distant relatives, offering loans, repairs or a way out of a mortgage, and then slip a transfer of the house into the paperwork. The Attorney General’s advice is just as direct: never transfer a deed without your own attorney, never sign anything you do not understand, and be wary of anyone who says you can “buy back” your home.
Hardware can make that habit easy for an older owner to keep. A video doorbell or small camera by the door lets them see and speak to a caller from the kitchen or their phone without unlocking anything. A smart lock means the people who should come in — family, the home attendant, the doctor’s nurse — have their own codes and never need the owner to come to the door at all, so a knock from a stranger can simply go unanswered. And because every family visitor has a code, the family can see from the history that the attendant came on Tuesday and nobody else did.
We set these up with the owner, at their pace, and leave large-print instructions. We also suggest the family sign the owner up for the city’s free deed alerts and keep the number for the city’s deed-theft hotline, 1-855-HOME-456, by the phone. A lock keeps people out of the hall; only those steps keep them out of the deed.
Landmarked rows
Our row is in the Bedford or Stuyvesant Heights historic district — where may a keypad or reader be mounted beside the front doors?
Within or right next to the door opening, and modestly. The Landmarks Preservation Commission’s permit guidebook does not have a section called “keypads”, but it does set out rules for the closest thing: light fixtures, intercom panels and doorbells “must be installed within or adjacent to a door opening,” and on a given opening there may be no more than two light fixtures and one intercom panel. We apply the same logic to a wall-mounted keypad or reader. Practically, that means inside the door reveal or on the frame, on the vestibule wall behind the outer doors, or on the outer leaf itself as part of the lock — not out on the carved face of the stoop surround.
The simplest answer is usually to avoid a separate wall device altogether. A smart deadbolt carries its own keypad on the door, which counts as hardware rather than an attachment to the facade; the guidebook lists repairing or replacing hardware such as hinges, knobs, locks and handles among work that may not need a permit at all. Where a separate reader is unavoidable — say, for a three-family house whose street door needs fob access — we fix it in the reveal or into mortar joints, keep it small and dark, and run its cable inside the house.
If your project goes beyond hardware — a new door, new ironwork, cutting stone, exposed conduit — talk to LPC staff before work starts. The commission’s staff can tell you whether a proposal fits its rules or needs review. We are glad to send them photographs and the lock’s drawings so the conversation is concrete.
There is already an intercom panel at our door opening — can a separate keypad still be added on a landmarked facade?
Often the better route is to replace the panel rather than add beside it. Because the guidebook allows one intercom panel per door opening, a second box next to an existing buzzer panel on a landmarked house is the kind of addition that invites questions. Many current entry panels combine call buttons and a keypad or fob reader in one plate, so a three-family house can swap its tired buzzer panel for a single combined unit in the same position and gain keyless entry without adding anything to the facade.
Where the existing panel must stay — it still works and the tenants rely on it — the keypad can go on the door itself as part of a smart deadbolt, or on the inside of the vestibule if only residents need it. Couriers and visitors keep using the bell; residents use the lock. That keeps the outside of the house exactly as it is.
If the buzzer system itself is failing, we would rather fix or replace it properly than build a lock plan around a fault. Our intercom installation in Bedford-Stuyvesant covers panel replacements on rowhouse fronts, and the two jobs can be done at the same visit.
Can the keypad for our front-yard gate go on the iron fence at the sidewalk instead of on the house?
In principle, yes. The same guidebook passage that limits intercoms to the door opening adds that “an intercom can also be installed on a fence or wall in front of the entranceway,” and a gate keypad sits in the same place for the same reason. On many Bed-Stuy rows the low iron fence and gate are original or carefully restored, though, so we fix to a post or a plate rather than drilling decorative ironwork, and we keep the device as small as the job allows.
The harder question is whether a locked gate is what you want. Gates on these rows usually open onto a small front yard and the areaway below the stoop — which is where parcels get left and where one r/BedStuy poster near Lafayette and Throop described a man who “politely opens my gate, steals my package & politely closes gate” at seven in the morning. A locked gate stops that, but it also stops couriers, meter readers and anyone who needs to reach the garden-floor door, so it needs a delivery code, a bell and, if the garden floor is someone’s home, an inside release that works in one motion without a key.
Power and cable are the practical limits. A battery keypad gate lock needs no wiring at all; a powered reader and gate strike needs a cable from the house, which we bring under the yard or along the areaway wall rather than across the stoop. We price both and let you choose.
Shared foyers and back doors
Parcels go missing from our building’s shared foyer even though the street door locks — how are people getting in, and what fixes it?
Almost always by a door that does not finish closing, a code too many people know, or a neighbour buzzing in whoever rings. One r/BedStuy thread from Lexington Avenue described someone getting in repeatedly over months and taking parcels left in the foyer — three times for one resident. In small walk-ups that pattern is common: the street door is heavy, its closer is tired, and it stops a quarter-inch short of latching, so anyone who pushes walks straight in.
The fix comes in layers. First the door: closer adjusted or replaced, strike aligned, latch checked so the door locks every single time it swings shut. Second the credentials: one personal code or fob per resident on the street door instead of one number shared since the last tenant left, so a leaked code can be removed in a minute. Third, if the building has space, a lockable parcel cupboard or room with its own keypad — one r/Brooklyn poster in a non-doorman building said adding a keypad deadbolt to the package room door “stopped most thieves.”
A building with three or more households is a multiple dwelling, so the city’s housing rules on entrance doors and self-closing doors apply, and under the Tenant Data Privacy Act an owner may not make a smart access system the only way into a tenant’s apartment. For buildings whose old buzzer is part of the problem, our Bed-Stuy door buzzer repair and the lock plan usually go together.
A house on our block was entered through the back — what should the rear garden door of a rowhouse get?
A lock that is as strong from the yard as the front door is from the street, and an inside release that a child or an elderly parent can use in the dark. Rear doors on Bed-Stuy rowhouses are often the original garden-floor door or a cheap replacement from decades ago, with glass in the top half, a worn frame and a single spring latch. Because the yard is enclosed by neighbours’ walls, people assume it is private; in practice it is the side of the house nobody watches.
We start with the frame and hinges, because a smart deadbolt in a soft or split frame fails at the first kick. Longer screws into the framing, a reinforced strike and, where needed, a new frame section come first. Then a keyless deadbolt with auto-lock, so the door relocks after someone takes out the rubbish, and a plain thumb-turn inside. If there is glass within reach of the thumb-turn we look at security film or a lock position further from the glass rather than a key-both-sides deadbolt, which would trap people inside in a fire.
The 79th Precinct has itself posted crime-pattern notices asking Bed-Stuy residents to lock doors and windows after rises in residential and commercial burglaries. A connected lock on the rear door lets you check from your phone at night that it really is locked, and alerts you if it opens while the house is empty. Many owners add a camera covering the yard at the same time.
