Condominium Key Management System: Who May Hold Which Key.

Which keys does a condominium actually have?

Far more than the unit doors, and nearly all of them belong to the building. Under the Strata Management Act 2013, common property is so much of the lot as is not comprised in any parcel, including any accessory parcel or provisional block on a certified strata plan, used or capable of being used by the occupiers of two or more parcels.

Every service riser, plant room, roof hatch, letterbox bank, gate and guardhouse cabinet is common property on that definition. The duty follows the ownership: a management corporation must properly maintain and manage the common property and keep it in a state of good and serviceable repair, and a joint management body carries the same duty before subdivision. Custody is part of keeping it that way — which is why it belongs with every layer, one contractor rather than with whichever trade needed the door last.

The law hints at why a key schedule rarely exists. Both statutory handover forms require the developer to hand over all the assets of the development area, including all keys, then leave one line for a brief description of them. A building inherits its keys with no schedule attached — the same gap that runs through everything else a committee inherits at handover.

Can the management hold a key to your unit?

Not by force of the by-laws, which give something narrower than a key. A proprietor must “permit the management corporation and its servants or agents, at all reasonable times and on reasonable notice being given (except in the case of emergency when no notice is required), to enter his parcel”. That is a right of entry exercised with the owner, not a right of custody.

Entry is for stated purposes: leaks and defects, shared pipes, wires, cables and ducts, the common property, and work reasonably necessary to the body’s duties. No provision requiring an owner to deposit a key was located in the Act or the Third Schedule by-laws, and the by-laws point the other way: a proprietor may install “any locking or safety device for protection of his parcel against intruders”, so long as it does not encroach on common property and is competently fitted. An owner exercising that right breaks any master suite his door was in, the day he does it, without telling anyone.

Committees searching this in Malaysia can end up reading a Canadian answer: the page Gemini returns for that question says most condominium corporations hold a master key to all units, that a lockout is not an emergency, and that in at least one Ontario case a corporation and its manager were held liable for granting access to someone no longer entitled to enter. Borrow its shape — who may take the key, when, where it lives. It is no authority for what a JMB here may do.

Which keys is the building not free to hand out?

Two: the switch room and the lift shaft, both usually on the handyman’s ring. The first is electrical: the Electricity Regulations 1994 state that no person, except a competent person or someone acting under a competent person’s immediate supervision, shall have access to any part of the switchboard. The door key is not the authority; competence is.

The Electricity Regulations 1994 also put the duty to keep an installation in good and working order on the owner, management, licensee or occupier, require a non-domestic installation to be checked and tested by a competent person at least once every five years, and punish a contravention on conviction with a fine of up to five thousand ringgit or up to a year’s imprisonment, or both.

The second is the lift. The Uniform Building By-Laws 1984 require provision for opening all landing doors by an emergency key irrespective of the position of the lift car — a key that opens a shaft. It belongs with the lift contractor and named trained people, for the reason only the lift contractor touches the lift controller. A third case runs the other way: the same by-laws require every exit door to open from the inside without a key or any special knowledge or effort, so a staircase door has a specification, and a padlock on it is not tight security but a breach.

What does a master key cost in security?

Every extra door a master key opens makes every lock in the suite weaker. Locksmith Ledger International, the locksmithing trade press, puts it without hedging: master keying is “a controlled loss of security”. Master pins add shear lines inside each cylinder, and as the number of shear lines increases, security decreases, each one reducing the level further.

Pushed far enough, master keying is not subtle — a six-pin lock loaded with a low bottom pin and a stack of master wafers can carry thousands of shear lines, at which point almost any key inserted will open it, and security is tighter when a totally separate key is issued for those doors.

Scale matters too. Locksmith Ledger puts a fully progressed two-step six-pin system at a maximum of 4,096 cuts and a five-pin one at 1,024 cut combinations, not all usable. That array is what one master sits on top of, and what has to be re-pinned when a master goes missing: not a lock problem, a suite problem with a quotation attached. So the real decision comes before anyone prices a cabinet — which doors should stop being key doors. A credential can be revoked for one person in a minute; a key cannot be revoked until the cylinder changes, which is the argument for putting a high-traffic door on a card and keeping the keyed doors few.

What must a key management system’s record produce?

The record, or key register, has to produce one sentence, months later, about a door nobody now remembers: who had this key, from when to when, and on whose authority. A key management system is whatever produces that sentence reliably, and an electronic cabinet does it by construction.

Users authenticate to the cabinet by fingerprint, PIN, token or the building’s existing card, every movement is recorded, and while a key is out anyone searching sees who holds it. A Malaysian supplier calls that a complete digital record of every key transaction; the cabinet manufacturer calls the hand-written book it replaces “inefficient, unreliable”, and says it makes tracing keys almost impossible.

Two features earn more than the cabinet. A curfew sets a maximum time a key may be out, and the overdue report lists every key with a curfew, the time left on it or how far past it is — which is how a riser key a contractor walked off with becomes a line on a report instead of a discovery. One manufacturer’s four cabinet sizes run from 5 to 720 keys, so size is rarely the constraint; the policy behind it is.

That record is personal data. A data user must take practical steps to protect personal data from loss, misuse, modification, unauthorised or accidental access or disclosure, alteration or destruction — having regard, among other things, to the measures ensuring the reliability, integrity and competence of personnel having access to it. A key register names people and places them at doors at times, so it belongs under the same written handling as a footage release policy, kept where the duty guard is, in the control room. It is the same kind of evidence as the patrol record, and whoever services the doors should be obliged to return keys to it by the maintenance contract.

Occhio Tec is an Extra Low Voltage contractor established in 2012, designing, installing and maintaining CCTV, access control, video intercom, structured networking and perimeter intrusion for condominiums in Mont Kiara, Bangsar and KLCC, including systems another contractor installed. Which doors should stay on a key, and which belong on a card, cannot be read off a drawing: request a site survey, or message +60 11-6494 4931.