Multifamily Access Control for Commercial Facilities

Some multifamily operators also run doors that are not apartments. A mixed-use tower with ground-floor retail, an office building in the same fund, a management company that took on a commercial contract. The access-control platform then has to do two jobs: provision residents from Yardi or RealPage at move-in, and manage employees, tenants, and contractors on a schedule the way a commercial system does. Two of the twelve vendors in our multifamily access control guide list commercial facilities as a segment alongside multifamily. This page covers both and the trade-off between them.

What this segment needs

The commercial side wants readers at doors, mobile credentials, schedules, and an audit trail. The multifamily side wants credentials that appear when a lease starts in the PMS and disappear when it ends, without a site team touching it. Most commercial platforms do the first well and the second not at all; the research notes list Kisi, for example, with a single Yardi Bluepoint connection and a weak multifamily fit, and Verkada with no PMS integration named. The two vendors on this page are the ones that publish both a multifamily product and a commercial one.

The other thing this segment needs is a decision about unit doors. Neither vendor here sells the smart-home hub and per-unit lock stack that SmartRent or PointCentral does. A mixed-use operator usually ends up with a commercial-grade platform on the common and commercial doors and a separate unit-lock platform on the apartments, and the question in the demo is whether the two can share a credential.

The table below is rendered from our vendor database, filtered to vendors that list commercial facilities, with a source URL and verification date on every fact.

How the fit differs

Brivo is cloud access control with a Multifamily Edition built for apartment communities and mixed-use. Its confirmed PMS list is Yardi, RealPage, Rent Manager, and Entrata, which is the widest native multifamily coverage of any commercial-first vendor in the category. It lists institutional multifamily and commercial facilities as its segments. For an operator who wants one vendor across the residential lobby, the amenity doors, and the ground-floor tenant spaces, and who runs one of those four PMS platforms, Brivo is the default to price first.

Avigilon Alta is the former Openpath, renamed under Motorola Solutions. It sells cloud readers and mobile credentials and reaches multifamily through partners such as iApartments rather than through a native PMS integration; it publishes no PMS list of its own. It lists commercial facilities first and institutional multifamily second. For an operator whose commercial doors outnumber the apartments, or whose security team already runs Avigilon video, it is the one to weigh, with the understanding that the multifamily provisioning path runs through a partner.

The Brivo vs Avigilon Alta comparison takes both through the same demo questions side by side. The research notes also record Brivo being compared against Kisi and against Openpath directly, which is the shape of most commercial shortlists.

Questions to ask

Ask which PMS the multifamily provisioning connects to natively, and if the answer is a partner, ask who owns that integration and its support. Ask what data syncs, in which direction, and whether it is real-time or scheduled; an office tenant’s badge schedule and a resident’s lease end date are different events and the platform should handle both.

Ask whether one mobile credential can open a commercial door on a schedule and a residential door by lease. Ask how contractors and vendors get temporary access on both sides. Ask what still works during an outage, since a retail tenant locked out at opening is a different problem from a resident locked out at night.

Ask about the residents who will not use an app. Washington’s ESSB 5937 requires a non-app key on request from January 2027, and New York has already seen a lawsuit on the point; commercial-first platforms tend to assume everyone has a phone. Ask who installs and supports the system, the vendor or an integrator, and whether the same integrator covers both sides of the building.

Neither vendor publishes pricing. Ask for the per-door reader figure, the per-unit or per-credential software figure, and the minimum, in writing. The vendors list for the category has every verified fact side by side, and the Yardi integrations page shows the full set of vendors with a confirmed Yardi connection.

What the Index shows

The 2026-09 export of the AI Shortlist Index records zero runs for multifamily access control on all four engines, so neither Brivo nor Avigilon Alta has a mention rate, position score, or consistency figure yet. Until that edition runs, we have no measurement of whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google AI name either vendor when a mixed-use operator asks. The snapshot above fills in with the first full edition. Either vendor wanting to know what shapes that result should read our page on AI visibility for proptech companies.

If the apartments are the bigger part of the portfolio, the institutional multifamily page covers the full-stack platforms this page leaves out.