As if real estate agencies don't have enough to worry about with the state of today's market, keys, rather the tracking of their location is one responsibility that's always been there. And, that responsibility includes the consequential liability of anything happening to the property, should keys at a real estate agency fall into criminal hands.

I visited a real estate agency recently which had over 800 keys—and this was a small agency. The keys are issued to and received by sales people, tenants, plumbers and other trades people and so on.

Instead of wasting time manually booking keys in and out of the office (through a manual register), this real estate office opted to install our new AssetTracker system.

The system works like this: on receipt of the system, all codes and descriptions of all keys are entered. This information includes the location of the key at the time of installation. This means the name of the persons that the keys have been issued to, the people authorised to hold the keys and so on.

What makes the system ideal for use by real estate offices its simplicity. Everytime a key is issued, this is scanned by the key issuer, with the name and other identification of the party receiving the keys entered into the system. AssetTracker also has the ability to quicklyl scan in driver's licences or business cards. This again saves time manually entering the data manually.

The office manager can easily find out at any time where each key is located by printing out a report when required. And, being modestly priced, AssetTracker easily pays for itself in a very short time.

That payback does not include the peace of mind of the licensee, who is responsible for the keys and the consequence of losing any of these, which could be quite costly. And, that doesn't just mean, key replacement and installation of new locks, but the possiblity of theft, vandalism, etc.