Lock obligations in rental housing come from habitability doctrine, specific state statutes, and lease terms, and they vary enormously by state. Here is how the pieces generally fit together and where to get an answer for your jurisdiction.
Passage, privacy, office, storeroom, classroom: these are defined behaviors with standardized designations, not marketing labels. Understanding what each one does lets you pick hardware from a description of how a room is actually used.
Delayed egress and controlled egress are narrow code exceptions that let a door resist immediate exit under tightly defined conditions. Understanding what those conditions are explains why so many installed systems do not qualify.
Every move out leaves an unknown number of keys in circulation. Here is how rekeying at turnover actually works, what state law tends to address, and which hardware choices make the job fast enough to do every single time.
An access control system is five components and a set of decisions about credentials, hosting, and wiring. Here is how the pieces fit, where the surprise costs live, and how to phase a rollout by risk.
