Monitored or Unmonitored Alarm: Which Suits a Rental Property

Landlords often assume an alarm is an alarm, but the way it alerts someone when it goes off makes a real practical difference, especially for a property that sits empty between tenancies or is managed at a distance. A bell only system simply sounds the siren and flashes the bell box, relying entirely on a neighbour or passer by noticing and doing something about it. Nothing gets sent to your phone and nothing gets reported anywhere automatically.

App based systems go a step further by pushing a notification to your phone the moment a sensor is triggered, which suits a landlord who wants to know quickly but is comfortable deciding themselves whether to call a tenant, a neighbour or the police. Speech dialler systems ring a preset list of phone numbers and play a recorded message, useful where nobody in the chain has a smartphone or reliable data signal. Beyond that sits third party professional monitoring, where a separate specialist monitoring company receives the alert and follows an agreed procedure, which can include contacting keyholders and, where a police response is warranted, that monitoring company liaising with the police directly.

It is worth being clear that any professional monitoring service is provided by a dedicated third party monitoring company rather than being run in house by an alarm installer, and police response through such a service depends on the alarm system meeting the monitoring company's own accreditation requirements. For landlords deciding between these options, the right answer usually comes down to how often the property is empty, who is realistically able to respond to an alert, and how much reassurance is needed for tenants and insurers.