Choosing Who Receives a Request for Access
Units, occupant types, custom groups, and how to avoid sending a notice to the wrong half of a building.
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The Selection step of the Request Access form decides who actually gets the notice. There are two ways to build the list.
By unit
The usual route. You pick the units, and you pick which occupant types within those units should be notified.
- Notify Community Types controls the second part. All Occupants covers everyone recorded against the unit. Otherwise you pick specific types, and the list of available types depends on the kind of property, so a residential building, a commercial property, and a campus each offer their own vocabulary.
- The unit search lets you find units by number, floor, building, or occupant name.
- Additional Units lets you add one off units individually on top of whatever your search selected.
By custom group
If you already maintain custom groups, you can send to those instead of picking units. This is the better option for a recurring audience you have already curated, for example every unit on a riser or every ground floor commercial tenant.
Who gets a notification, in practice
A request is created per unit, and the notification goes to the occupants of that unit who match the types you selected and who have a way to receive it, meaning an email address on file or the app installed for push. An occupant with neither is not reachable, and the unit's card will simply sit unanswered.
This is the single most common reason a request looks ignored. Before you assume someone is refusing to engage, confirm the unit actually has a reachable occupant on file. If it does not, that is a resident records problem rather than an access problem, and the fix is in Units and Residents.
Choosing well
- For work inside a unit, notify the people who live or work there, which usually means all occupants.
- For work in common areas that only affects access, consider whether you need individual unit notices at all. A news post may serve better.
- For anything involving a legal notice period, prefer over inclusion. A person who did not receive the notice is the person who complains.
Double check before sending
The confirmation after sending tells you how many units were reached. Read it. If the number is smaller than you expected, your unit search or occupant type filter excluded someone, and it is far easier to fix that in the first five minutes than after the crew arrives.