What happens when a tenant is locked out of their unit at 2am?

For Property Management Companies

Lockouts are extremely common after-hours calls, but they are not usually classified as maintenance emergencies in the same tier as flooding or no heat, since they don't threaten property or immediate safety in most cases, and how they're handled depends entirely on your company's specific policy, which varies quite a bit between property management companies. During setup, you tell Voksha your exact lockout procedure: some companies have an on-site or on-call maintenance staff member who can let tenants in with a master key or through a smart lock system remotely (increasingly common with properties using Latch, Yale, or similar smart lock systems where a code can be issued instantly without anyone driving to the property); others direct tenants to call a locksmith at their own expense per the lease terms, since many leases explicitly state lockouts are the tenant's responsibility and cost, not the property's. Voksha states whichever policy you've configured clearly and consistently, verifies the caller's identity against the tenant record on file before providing any access code or confirming a maintenance dispatch (an important step to avoid giving building access information to someone who isn't actually authorized for that unit), and either dispatches your on-call staff for units with staff-assisted entry or gives the tenant your standard locksmith referral information if that's your policy. This consistency matters because lockout policy inconsistently applied, letting some tenants in for free while charging others, creates both a fairness problem and potential Fair Housing exposure if the inconsistency correlates with any protected characteristic, even unintentionally.