I disagree. Whether the prior occupant or the property management company has extra sets of keys, you generally don't want some random prospective tenant out there to have the keys to a unit that you will eventually want to rent out to another individual. For Airbnb's/STR's, same problem; guests returning to a unit much later to carry out illegal activities is rather well documented at this point. Across the board, it's not worth the logistical pain and/or liability risk. In the case of a prior tenant, you generally know who the person is...etc. There are edge cases for sure (e.g. evictions) but it's generally less risky.
You agree with the person you replied to. They are saying guests may return to carry out illegal activity even if they returned the keys because they could have just made copies.
My initial comment only said that, in our experience, it's a bad idea to use physical key-exchange system for short-term visits of a physical space. Key copies & key returns being two examples of problematic cases. I only brought up key returns in my initial comment because that's the one that caused the most headaches at Sonder. Most people, it turns out, are honest but also forgetful :) The key-copy potentially exposes you to a lot more liability though...
Yep. Bad actors will still find a way circumvent the system, either by copying keys or other means. It's a matter of risk and liability mitigation, not prevention.
I'd be curious to know if you're building a reputation system for renters/rentees (users), since that would provide value in such a market to fight it.
We are not. This is mostly because we are an infrastructure company that takes care of bridging the air-gap between the devices out there and the software applications that want to use them. Whether the locks are used for hospitality, self-storage access, or rentals is somewhat dependent on the context, and there's a lot of complexity that is unique to each vertical. We think our (beta) customers do a better job at this than we could.
