How I Wasted $1000 to Install a Lock for my Airbnb. Best Lock/Software

The internet is rife with claims as to what the best lock there is on the market for short-term rentals. 

The reason there is a market for these specialized locks is for security. Personally, my cleaner doesn't appreciate guests who arrive earlier than the scheduled check-in time. Neither is coming to a place to turn over the place to find the guests still having breakfast hour past check out time. In my case, this would be an 11 AM breakfast when checkout is at 10 AM.

This is why software and locks come into play. When integrating with your favorite OTA (Online Travel Agency) they will automatically generate a random code that takes effect at check-in and deletes itself at check-out time. 

I have had many times where guests came back after checkout to retrieve their items. I was simply able to buzz them in remotely when necessary. It does add peace of mind knowing that they cannot regain entry once their stay is over.

I learned the hard way what company works best in this market. 

I recently had both locks of my vacation rentals replaced. One was the Open Edge Lever from RemoteLock. This is their in-house brand for locks. The OpenEdge won't last you more than 2 years tops. I have had them malfunction at 8-9 months old. I suggest purchasing one of the more established brands they have for sale on their website

The second lock I purchased was the Schlage FE599NX. It came with a Z-wave controller from Vera. Now Schlage is a great brand, but the Vera controller that comes with it tends not to integrate. It seems the company set their controllers up that 50% of them to work and the other 50% are dummy controllers. Their customer service is virtually nonexistent. 

Imagine this. You pay $300 for the lock and controller, another $190 for a locksmith to install the lock and controller. Of course, the controller doesn't integrate. You get billed for 1.5 hours from the locksmith instead of the expected 30 minutes. 

You reach out to Vera and ask them for support. They set up a date and time where they will troubleshoot with you. This time you have your property manager go down at the appointed time. 

He's there bright and early with his laptop waiting for Vera to do a hard update. But hey, no call. Nada.

You reschedule but this time you're smarter. Of course.

You email the support agent that they will call in at the appointed time.  They confirm.

Your manager gets down there again. This time they say "you need an ethernet cable". Oh, of course. Thank you for relaying that regular wifi won't work for an update. It would have been nice to know this ahead of time. (For all you geeks out there, I guess we should have known that we would need an ethernet cable to run an update on the controller hub).

After 2 hours of trying to update via wifi, we decide to call it a day.

Lesson for today.

Write this down.

Don't be like me. 

Get it right the first time. 

RemoteLock sells a great software called EdgeState but their OpenEdge brand just won't cut it for a busy vacation rental. 

Also, when possible do not purchase an electronic lever handle lock. Guests will feel more secure if the electronic lock is a deadbolt. A lever lock can easily be bashed open by any competent thief. If not, they should find themselves another profession, perhaps a Vera Customer Support Agent. 

The best combination would be to use EdgeStates' affordable vacation lock software. 

In terms of locks, look out for the Deadbolt locks over Lever Locks. Yale, Schlage and Kwikset are all decent reliable brands. Make sure to stay away from their OpenEdge brand.
(To be fair, the OpenEdge does have the option of directly integrating with Wifi without using an external controller. However, the locks will fail eventually due to poor mechanical internals. Be it battery drainage, keypad malfunctioning or just not updating lock codes).

Feel free to compare price, availability and shipping times for a lock on other sites. As long as you match the exact model number shown on RemoteLock website, it will integrate with their software. 

See the below example:

One of the support agents at Remote Lock admitted to me that they are primarily a software company. They only sell the locks as a service but don't really care where I purchase the lock, be it Home Depot or Amazon.com.

There is a feature that they don't have which would be greatly beneficial to guests. This would be to create 4 digit codes based on the guest's last 4 digits of their phone number. This is a real convenience so that the guest and other people in their party don't have to memorize the 4 digit code for the duration of their stay. This feature isn't available anywhere else. I know that hosts will manually create the check-in code based on the last 4 phone digits but I have not come across a software that has this convenient feature.  

Any comments or suggestions as to what locks or software perform better let me know.