Apartment Building Security Cameras for Common Areas

The working rule in residential buildings is simple: cover the route, not the home. Corridors, lift lobbies, lift cars, the street entrance, the car park and the store rooms are shared space; the inside of a flat, the view through its window and the area immediately outside its door are not. A dome aimed down a corridor satisfies that rule, and the same dome rotated 30 degrees toward the windows opposite does not.

Two practical habits keep the design on the right side of the line. First, walk the building at specification stage with the camera positions marked and look at what each one would see, including the far end of the corridor and the courtyard below. Second, write the retention period and the viewing rules into the handover pack so residents get a consistent answer.

• No camera inside a flat, and no lens aimed into a window, balcony or doorway.
• Corridor cameras aimed along the corridor, mounted at 2.6–3 m, never at a resident’s door.
• Entrance signage stating that recording is in operation — standard practice in most markets, and the management company’s decision.
• A documented retention period (30 days is the common figure) and a named person who may export footage.
• A written procedure for police or insurance requests, agreed before the first incident.

A parcel taken from a lobby, a scratch in the basement, a bike missing from the store: the value of the system is decided in the ten minutes after the report. That means the manager needs to search by date and time, playback on the recorder across the relevant channels, and export a clip that plays on a laptop without specialist software.

The other half is arithmetic. A report that arrives three weeks after the incident has to fall inside the retention window, which is why 30 days is the usual minimum and why 32 channels at 5 MP needs 8–14 TB to hold it. If the building only keeps a week, tell the management company that plainly at specification stage rather than discovering it during the first claim.

Apartment buildings are most exposed at night and most poorly lit in exactly the places that matter: the basement level with half its tubes out, the bin store with a single bulkhead, the rear lane with nothing at all. The 5 MP full colour low-light series keeps those positions in colour without external lighting and without switching on the camera’s own LEDs, so residents see no glow and the image still shows clothing and vehicle colour when something happens.

Where a position is genuinely dark — a sealed plant room, an unlit bin store with no spill light — the built-in fill light maintains colour, and it is worth saying so in the design. What you should not do is plan a lighting upgrade to make the CCTV work.

• Cameras aimed across a corridor instead of along it, so every face is a blur at the far end and every resident feels filmed at their own door.
• A switch mounted inside a riser cupboard residents can open, or a camera within arm’s reach on a ground-floor wall.
• Too few spare PoE ports: the block adds a bin store camera and a car park ramp camera in year two, and there is nowhere to plug them in.
• No night test. The system is commissioned at 10:00 and the first incident happens at 23:00.
• Cameras specified without housings, leaving 38 × 38 mm board modules exposed to weather and dust on the outside of the building.