It was lost but now its found

It used to be that you couldn’t leave home without two things. Your wallet and your keys.

Time has moved on a little – your mobile phone can do pretty much anything your wallet used to be able to do.

That still leaves your keys as something unique and irreplaceable.

On a day-to-day basis, it’s the thing you need to have if you want to leave your home and go to work. And come back.

But what if they were, in fact, part of your work? If you were an estate agent and one of your jobs was to keep track of all the keys… to all the properties.

Sounds simple to anyone not in the business. Sadly, the reality is that keeping track of all the keys, all of the time, is a bit like doing sudoku while standing at a bus stop.

Keeping track

Help, though, might finally be on the way. Aaron Cambden has been a letting agent for 12 years and has been in the property business for 15 years, so the subject of keeping track of keys to the many houses and flats he manages was always a puzzle.

In a world where technology now informs so much of what we do, the method that he and his team were using was a bit primitive – an A4 pad, which had names and addresses and then were crossed out when the keys were either taken or returned. The way that most estate agents have gone about their business for years.

What could possibly go wrong?

Human error, as it turns out, with contractors or some staff not sticking to the system. During the lockdowns enforced by COVID19, Aaron found more time on his hands to ponder what he could do to find a system that was just a bit more efficient.

The system that he and his friends in the technology industry devised was adding a fob to every set of keys. And then creating a computer programme that recognises the fobs and creates a history of where the keys are and who has them. Something fast and adaptable.

The hope it that it will put an end to questions like ‘has anyone seen that key” or “who last had the key for xxxx?”. This system works really well when the whole office buys into it, which is what Aaron has found.

This new way of working is called Keyhive - It’s efficient, is now being used by other agents, aside from Aaron’s and is being updated, as more information is being gathered.

The website for the product has details of all the pricing as well as up-to-date figures for how many keys are accounted for using Keyhive.