Key Takeaways

• Remote Video Monitoring (RVM) uses AI plus trained operators to watch your security cameras 24/7 and intervene in real time, before incidents escalate into losses.
• Macro crime stats hide property-level reality. Even with national property crime down 8.1% in 2024, only 30.5% of property crime victims actually report incidents, meaning real exposure on your property is well above headline numbers.
• Guards are getting harder to hire. The U.S. security industry sees annual turnover between 100% and 300%.
• Hakimo customers report savings of $125,000 to $750,000 annually per property compared to traditional guard staffing.

A break-in at a property lasts about 8 minutes. The fallout takes away through months of NOI: lease breaks, online reviews that scare your next applicant away, and slow drag of repairs and replacements that don't make the headline P&L.

So when an asset manager asks "is our security actually working?", that's more like a financial question (of course, wearing a safety mask.)

For years, the answer was a guard at the gate, a CCTV system, and the alarm contract, all of it is real.

What's not real is the protection any of it actually provides at 2 AM when someone hops your perimeter fence. The guard is asleep, on break, or new to the property. The cameras are recording footage you'll only watch after the damage is done. The alarm has gone off so many times for stray cats or tree branches that the police have stopped responding without a verified threat.

Remote video monitoring is what's filling the gap. If you manage apartment communities, you should understand exactly how it works before your next renewal lands on your desk.

What Is Remote Video Monitoring?

Remote video monitoring is a 24/7 security service that uses AI and trained human operators to actively watch your property's existing cameras, detect threats in real time, and intervene before incidents escalate.

The core mechanics break down into four moving parts:

1. Your existing cameras stream feeds to an off-site operations center.
2. AI analyzes every event continuously, using computer vision to filter out routine activity (residents, leasing staff, animals, weather) and flag genuine threats (perimeter breaches, loitering, suspicious vehicle behavior).
3. A trained operator verifies the alert in seconds and decides on a response like Hakimo's median response time is 6 seconds from AI flag to operator review.
4. The operator intervenes through tools deployed on your property: a live, personalized talk-down through a speaker, a guard dispatch, leading to a verified 911 call with suspect descriptions and live video evidence.

You’ll hear two terms used a lot in this space, and they’re worth keeping straight. Remote guarding is the service itself, security professionals watching your property from an off-site operations center and intervening in real-time, in place of an on-site guard. Human-in-the-loop monitoring describes how work is split between AI and people: the AI handles continuous detection, the human handles the verification and judgement.

Why Your Current Security Setup Is Probably Failing You

Most multifamily properties are still paying for an outdated security model. Here are three problems that are quietly draining the value out of your security spend.

First, guards are getting harder to keep. Industry turnover runs between 100% and 300% annually, so the guard at your gate tonight probably won't be there in six months. With median guard wages at $38,370, the math doesn't favor retention.

Alarms have trained the police to ignore them. Majority of activations are false and verified-response policies in major cities now mean unconfirmed alerts get deprioritized or ignored.

Third, your cameras are recording, not protecting. Without proactive monitoring, footage only tells you what happened. By the time you're reviewing the clip, the damage is already on your books and the bad review is already on your listing page.

You're paying for three things that no longer work the way they used to.

What Multifamily Operators Are Actually Up Against

The threat profile at apartment communities has shifted in a way that traditional security stacks weren't built to handle.

A decade ago, security planning was about preventing the dramatic event: the break-in, the assault, the high-dollar burglary. Today, the bigger problem for most operators is volume and visibility. Vehicle break-ins in the parking lot. Trespassers in amenity spaces. Package theft in mail rooms. Trash dumping at the back of the property. Loitering in the breezeway. None of it makes the local news. All of it accumulates into the lived experience of your residents, and into your online reviews.

The package issue alone tells the story. With residents averaging roughly 10 deliveries a month per unit, a 200-unit community sees tens of thousands of packages a year flowing through its common areas. SafeWise estimates 104 million packages were stolen in the U.S. in 2025, and the multifamily share of that is significant.

The losses themselves are the visible part. The bigger hit usually shows up later, in lease non-renewals and in the slow erosion of online ratings that next year's prospects will read before they ever tour the property.

How Remote Video Monitoring Actually Protects Your Property

The mechanics break down into four moving parts, and each one closes a gap that traditional security leaves open:

• Continuous monitoring: The AI models trained on millions of hours of footage learn what normal looks like at your property. The system ignores residents walking dogs, leasing staff entering the office, and raccoons in the dumpster area. It flags what doesn't belong like a person scaling the perimeter fence, a stranger testing car door handles, a vehicle parked in the loading zone for an hour.

• Human verification in seconds: This is where the human-in-the-loop model earns its keep. Hakimo's median operator response time is 6 seconds from the AI flag to a human eye on the situation. No guard team in the country can match that consistency at 2 AM across multiple sites.

• Live personalized deterrence: Most asset managers underestimate this part. A live, personalized voice-down like "You in the white hoodie near building C, you're being recorded and police are en route," turns away the vast majority of intruders before they touch anything. Hakimo's solution includes a 120dB instant talk-down system for exactly this reason.

• Verified call to police: Because the operator is watching live and can describe the suspect, the location, and the activity, the call goes in as Priority 1. Verified incidents see a quick response time as compared to the unverified alarms.

What to Look for in a Remote Video Monitoring Partner

There are a lot of remote video monitoring partners in the market but not every “AI security” is built the same. Here’s what asset managers should be asking on the sales call:

- Does it work with the cameras you already own?

If a vendor wants to rip out and replace your CCTV, you're looking at a six-figure capex hit before you've prevented a single crime. The right partner integrates with ONVIF-compliant cameras and most major VMS and access control systems out of the box. Hakimo, for instance, offers 50+ integrations with industry-standard platforms.

- Is it actually proactive, or just smarter recording?

A real RVM platform should issue automated talk-downs, not just send an alert to your phone an hour later. Ask for the median response time. If a vendor can't answer in seconds, they aren't built for prevention.

- Is there a human in the loop?

AI alone over-flags or under-flags depending on training. The systems that actually work pair computer vision with trained operators who make judgment calls. That's the Hakimo model: AI for speed, humans for context.

- What's the operator's proven coverage?

Hours monitored is one of the few honest metrics in this industry. It tells you whether the vendor has run the system at scale or just demoed it.

How Hakimo Fits In

Hakimo was built specifically for this model. The platform reads any ONVIF-compliant camera you already own, layers AI-driven detection on top, and routes flagged events to trained operators who verify and intervene in a median of 6 seconds, usually through a live talk-down before any incident escalates.

Property management is one of Hakimo's core verticals. Operators like Stockdale Management, Sares Regis, and Tangram Group rely on the platform to protect perimeters, parking lots, mail rooms, and amenity spaces across their portfolios. The savings are real: customers report $125,000 to $750,000 in annual savings per property compared to traditional guard contracts.

The proposition is simple. Take the cameras you already have, make them dramatically smarter, and resolve incidents while they're still incidents, not after they've turned into lease breaks and one-star reviews.

Where This Is Going

The economics have shifted. In 2010, asking AI to monitor your cameras would have produced a system more annoying than useful. In 2026, the same task is faster, more accurate, and dramatically cheaper than the human alternative.

Add in the worsening guard shortage and the increasing reluctance of police to respond to unverified alarms, and the calculus for any multifamily operator gets simpler every quarter.

You don't need to be a security expert to see what's happening. You need to be willing to look at the math and act on it. The portfolios that protect their NOI through the rest of this decade will be the ones that stopped reacting to incidents and started preventing them.

If your current setup is still built around guards and after-the-fact recordings, it’s time to upgrade. There's a better option, and it's already deployed at the properties competing for your next applicant.

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