Door lock solutions seem to be a fickle bunch Valerie... We started doing things manually with Vera back in the 2016 timeframe. It was great, easy to use but we only had a couple of properties we were managing and creating the codes by hand and putting the restrictions on them for arrival and departure was relatively easy. When we added 14 additional properties all at the same time it because nearly impossible for us to manage so we ventured out on a search and looked at Lynx (I don't recall what their original name was.) which supported an interface with Vera as well as Remote Lock which supported Vera as well. We had challenges with Lynx and decided we would try to migrate some of our locks to the Samsung Smartthings platform instead of Vera. Still zwave controlled locks but using Smartthings controllers. We had limited success there with Lynx so we went to Remote Lock. Things chugged along fine with RL for awhile but their licensing started to get in the way when we added 12 more properties. I posted in another thread about the licensing and how expensive it became to manage our booking volume with their per lock/per guest pricing. We started looking for a solution. We chose Brivo as that solution. It meant we would have to migrate all of our locks to Brivo controllers but at the time we signed up the pricing was based on controller and how are properties are situated this made a single vacation rental with perhaps 5 locks affordable again. Good interface, good integration with OR everything was fine until Jan of 2023. I received a large bill from them. We were apparently the last customer that had the per controller pricing structure and they moved us to the per lock billing without even discussing it with us. 50 locks at $12 dollars per month was more that our budget wanted to take and even after their concession to $10 the reality is I am not getting $500 per month worth of service from them. So long and short we are now back looking at solutions for our door lock dilemma.
Since we initially setup our locks, wifi controlled door locks have come a long way and seem to be what most companies are supporting if they do not have their own zwave controllers. Replacing all locks is an option but one we would rather not take at $200-300 per lock depending on type. Zwave mesh networks can also control other things besides just door locks... you can do thermostats, lights, etc... so ideally zwave is where we would like to be with a partner that controls the locks with OR and we control the thermostats, lights, etc... with the partner's UI.
I've taken the OR Integration Partner list and have contracted all of them. I'm finding they are quite "proud" of their software. One vendor Ive talked with has indicated a price of $15 for the primary door, $3 for addon doors in the same unit and then $8 for an employee only access. For us that is $650 +/- per month. I can hire someone to do daily data entry on Vera door locks for 30 hours a month (and it will take nowhere near that for our 32 properties) for less than that. So I know for sure we will not be going with that vendor.
A tech person should be able to come up with a simplified integration to VERA that reads a property ICAL and adds/removes/updates door lock codes. I have found one such vendor, not on Vera unfortunately but on Smartthings. Since Smartthings has changed their underlying architecture their apps are not working at this point either. I've also placed feelers out in the Vera world...
I'm not opposed to paying for a capability but I think it needs to be reasonable based on what it does for our business. The prices I am seeing now just can't be justified for businesses of our size. I'll keep you updated on what I find out.
