An Increase in Property Crime was Driving Residents Away

When Prominent Realty Group of Georgia President Douglas Foppe reached out to Flock Safety, he was looking for crime-fighting solutions that would actually work for his communities.

An increase in crime at his properties over the last few years was taking a toll both on residents and on company profits.

From properties in the urban Buckhead, Atlanta area all the way to Hilton Head, South Carolina, car break-ins, burglaries, and occasional assault were plaguing residents and their peace of mind. Things got worse when a particular incident in one of Douglas’s gated apartment communities made its rounds on social media; the online reviews for that apartment took a bitter beating.

As news about unsolved crimes spread, residents began feeling unsafe and started moving out, leaving Douglas with a high turnover rate in residents and a dip in property profits.

Douglas knew he needed to take action fast to make his properties safer for residents, not just for their peace of mind, but also for his own.

Finding a Security Solution That Worked

It wasn’t that Douglas didn’t have security systems at his Realty Group properties. He had been trying for two years to bring down crime rates for his residents but kept garnering only mediocre results.

First, he set up traditional security cameras at one of his properties in Atlanta. The video footage he was able to get from this system provided some information but was never enough for police to solve the case or for Douglas and his team to stop the crime from happening again. Plus, the hours out of his workday spent sifting through footage just to arrive at a dead end wasn’t worth it. Then, Douglas tried enlisting the help of courtesy officers for his properties. This worked for a while, but criminals eventually figured out the times officers weren’t present.

Douglas knew the results he wanted to achieve from a security system, and they were ambitious. He wanted a system that could catch the right kind of evidence for police to solve the case, drive crime rates down or even eliminate it completely, and make his properties a safer and more enjoyable place to live for residents.

The search for another security system was on.

Douglas Achieved the Results He Was Looking For

After hearing about Flock Safety’s wireless and affordable Automatic License Plate Reading (ALPR) system through a friend, Douglas decided to try it out for himself. At $2,500 for a camera, system, and maintenance altogether, the cost was more than friendly for his budget, and he was curious to see how Flock would perform compared to the security systems he had in the past. He installed a single Flock Safety ALPR at the front of his Nashville, Tennessee property together with our security signs.

Within six weeks, his Nashville property went from having an average of three crime incidents a week to zero.

Douglas’s Flock camera not only read and recorded license plates on vehicles, but it also recorded details like color, make, model, day, and time, regardless of whether the vehicle had a license plate, a paper plate, or no plate at all.

In addition to eliminating crime from his Nashville property, Douglas immediately saw an improvement in time usage. With Flock, he would no longer have to spend hours sifting through footage. It gave Douglas peace of mind to know he could simply run a quick search for vehicle color, time frame, or even animal and be able to pull up clear footage he could send as evidence to police if needed.

“A huge help for bringing down crime in my properties is having a plate reader. When we used Flock’s system in Nashville, we put the camera at the front of our property together with their yard signs that read, “Monitored 24/7.” We found that over the last 6 weeks, we went from an average of three incidents a week to zero. Could we have done that with a fake camera? That might have helped for a couple of weeks. But if people figured that out, that would have been very bad for residents and my properties.”

– Douglas Foppe, President, Prominent Realty Group of Georgia

By eliminating crime at one of Douglas’s communities, Flock Safety laid the foundation for resident safety and happiness as an easily achievable goal for other property managers.