In the third quarter of 2013, a 240-unit Houston multifamily community logged eleven separate police reports. Vehicle burglaries, package theft, two aggravated incidents in the parking deck, a stairwell assault. The on-site property manager was running a national-chain security contract that promised “dedicated coverage” and delivered three different officers in nine nights — none of whom could find the maintenance shop without GPS.
The manager had a longtime relationship with a Houston building contractor — Tell Projects — who had been renovating units across her portfolio for years. They had the same problem at almost every site they touched: ownership groups were buying security like they were buying cleaning — lowest bid, generic contract, rotating strangers in uniforms. The result was predictable. Officers who didn’t know the property. Reports that didn’t reach insurers in a usable format. Patrol patterns that any tenant could recite by week two.
The two of them sketched a different model on the back of a leasing-office sheet: a security firm that would only take multifamily contracts. Officers assigned to a property would stay assigned. They would learn the maintenance schedule, the courier routes, the names of residents who walked dogs at 2 a.m. They would write reports in the format AppFolio and Yardi could actually ingest. They would refuse retail jobs, refuse event security, refuse corporate office contracts — not because the work was beneath them, but because every hour spent on a non-multifamily client was an hour not spent mastering multifamily.
Multifamily Top Security launched in 2014 as a division of Tell Projects, with a single officer team, a single property under contract, and a single rule. Eleven years later that first property is still under contract. The number of multifamily communities we protect has grown to 217. The rule has not moved a millimeter.
We never took the retail bid. We never took the event-security gig. We never took the corporate office contract. We probably never will.