A guide to common-area camera systems for apartment buildings and housing estates

Who decides, and who is responsible?

If a camera in an apartment building starts as a device one resident put up at the entrance with their own money, within a few months it becomes a point of dispute. Who is watching, where are the recordings, why can the neighbor's door be seen? Writing down the answers to these questions from the start is more important than the installation itself.

Placing a camera in a common area is usually discussed and decided at the owners' meeting. The majority required may vary depending on your management plan and the content of the decision; consult a lawyer on this point. Writing down the camera locations, how long recordings will be kept and who will have access to them in the decision reduces disputes later.

Expert note: Attach a camera layout plan to the meeting minutes. If what each camera sees is on paper, a new manager will also run the system by the same rules.

In which common areas are cameras placed?

In housing estates and apartment buildings, incidents mostly happen in the same places: cars get scratched in the parking lot, a bicycle disappears from the entrance, a delivery is taken from in front of the door, construction debris is dumped in the trash area. Choose camera locations based on these incidents.

Do not expect to see every car in a parking lot from a single camera. In an indoor parking garage, columns block the view; cameras placed at both ends of the aisle between two rows, looking down the aisle, leave fewer blind spots. In an open parking lot, if night lighting is weak, cameras with enough infrared range or extra lighting are needed. If you want to read license plates at the estate gate, a general-view camera will not do the job; a separate camera aimed at the point where vehicles slow down is planned.

• Building entrance door: from the inside, at an angle that shows the face of the person entering.
• Main estate entrance and barrier: vehicle and pedestrian traffic covered by separate cameras.
• Open and indoor parking: cameras that see the rows of cars from end to end.
• Trash and recycling area.
• Playground and walkways.
• Perimeter wall and back garden gates.
• In front of the elevator and the basement entrance corridor.

Privacy: what must not be visible?

A common-area camera must not see inside an apartment, its balcony or through its door. If a camera in a floor corridor looks straight at apartment doors, who visited whom and when gets recorded, which leads to justified objections from residents. In such spots, turn the angle toward the stairwell or the elevator exit.

Some cameras have a masking feature that covers part of the image with a black box. If a window of the neighboring building is visible from the garden, mask that area. Whether to put a camera inside the elevator is a separate matter that residents need to discuss.

Put up notice signs showing that recording is taking place at the entrance doors, the parking entrance and the estate gate. For what the sign should say, see our KVKK article.

Cabling and infrastructure between blocks

In a single-building apartment block, all the cameras are brought together in a cabinet in the basement or on the ground floor and receive both power and video through a PoE switch. Multi-block estates are different. Copper network cable does not carry signals reliably beyond about 100 meters; if the distance between blocks exceeds this, fiber cable is run between the blocks, and a small cabinet and a switch are installed in each block.

Running the cable through conduit buried underground lasts longer than letting it hang down the facade. Exposed cable hardens in the sun, cracks and lets water in. In the Şanlıurfa summer, the sun beating on the facade heats cable trays and camera housings intensely; place outdoor cameras under the eaves where possible.

To protect against lightning and overvoltage, consider fitting protection devices at the ends of copper lines running between buildings. Fiber cable does not carry electricity, so it has an advantage in this respect too.

Recording room, monitoring and access rights

The recorder should be kept in a locked cabinet in the management office or the security booth. Kept in a cupboard anyone can open, the NVRis open to recordings being deleted or the device being removed. Put a UPS in the cabinet for the NVR, switch and modem so recording does not stop when the power goes out.

If there is a security guard, they watch the live view on the monitor in the booth. Limit the right to view past recordings and export them to one or two people chosen by the manager or the management board. Giving every resident access to all cameras on their phone may seem easy, but it creates problems in terms of personal data protection. When a resident experiences an incident, they apply to the management, and the recording is reviewed by the authorized person.

Expanding or upgrading an existing system

Many older housing estates still have analog cameras and coaxial cables in working order. There is no need to replace the whole system at once. First check which cameras' images are not useful; entrance and parking cameras are usually upgraded first. In some cases, the existing coaxial cable can continue to be used with high-definition analog cameras and suitable devices. This decision is made on site based on the condition of the cable.

If you are thinking of adding a license plate recognition camera, a barrier or access control at the estate entrance, plan the camera infrastructure in the same cabinet and on the same network as these systems. Adding them later means opening a second cable route.

Maintenance and responsibility

After installation, camera lenses gather dust, spider webs reflect the infrared light, and disks fail over the years. When the management changes, the system password and handover documents can get lost. That is why you should ask the installer for the camera list, the IP addresses, the administrator password delivered in a sealed envelope, and the layout plan. At least once a year, have lens cleaning, a recording check and a disk health test done.

Assign maintenance to one person. The manager, the head of security or an owner responsible for technical matters can open the past recordings of a few cameras on the recorder once a month and check that recording is actually taking place. Noticing that a camera's image has been lost or recording has stopped within a few days, rather than on the day of an incident, makes a big difference. Some recorders can send an email or app notification when a disk error occurs or a camera connection drops; turn this feature on and make sure the notification reaches the manager's phone.

Frequently asked