Access control in Belfast, for busy multi-tenant buildings.

A lot of what we fit in Belfast goes into buildings where several organisations share one entrance. Office floors around Adelaide Street, Linenhall Street and the Gasworks off the Ormeau Road often have one shared front door and several separate tenants above it, so the system has to let a receptionist manage the ground floor while each company controls its own floor, with a log that shows who came in and when.

Titanic Quarter is a different shape of job. Newer office buildings and apartment blocks around Queen's Road and the Odyssey area tend to have underground parking, communal entrances and lift lobbies that all need to work together, so we network readers at the car park barrier, the main door and the lift so one fob does the lot. Around Boucher Road, where offices sit alongside gyms and trade units, the usual request is a keypad or fob at the staff entrance with a separate visitor intercom at the front.

Apartment blocks in the Cathedral Quarter and along Lanyon Place are usually retrofits into an existing communal door, so we work around the building's wiring and management arrangements rather than assuming a blank slate, and we hand the managing agent a system they can add or remove residents from themselves.

• Shared office entrances with per-tenant floor access and a single visitor log
• Apartment block communal doors with resident fobs and a video entry panel
• Car park barriers and lift lobbies networked to the same Paxton system
• Staff keypads with individual codes for gyms, trade units and workshops
• Retrofits into existing communal doors without disturbing the building's wiring

Because Coast Data Security also installs CCTV and gate automation, a Belfast building can have its entrance camera, its door reader and its car park barrier running from one installer and, where the hardware supports it, tied into one app rather than three separate contracts. That matters most in mixed-use buildings, where a facilities manager wants one point of contact rather than a different contractor for each system.

For offices and apartment blocks that already have some access control fitted, whether that is an old proximity system or a basic keypad, we can usually extend it rather than replace it outright: adding extra readers, bringing in door entry video, or moving from a stand-alone keypad to a networked system that keeps a proper log. Where the building genuinely needs a fresh start, the survey tells us that too, honestly, before any work is quoted.

The survey settles it precisely, but this covers the shapes of building we see most often across Belfast.