The apartment security guard alternative most PMs settle on: a $450 box that plugs into the DVR you already own.

The cheapest defensible alternative for most Class B and C multifamily properties is an edge AI device that runs on the cameras you already own. Cyrano costs $450 hardware and $200/month of service. That is roughly $2,850 in year one, vs $33,600 to $54,000 for a nights-only contract guard. The math only works because you do not buy new cameras, you reuse the DVR or NVR already on site by tapping its HDMI output.

It replaces the watching part of a guard's job, which is the part that actually drives most security outcomes. A real guard at a 120-unit property cannot watch 16 to 25 cameras at once. Cyrano can. What it does not replace is a physical response. For most multifamily operators, the response was already 911 anyway: contract guards almost never legally engage. The shift is moving spend from a person who does not see the incident to software that flags it in seconds and sends a text or call.

Because the rest of the industry sells new IP cameras. Verkada, Rhombus, and Deep Sentinel all need you to rip and replace your existing CCTV, which is a $10,000 to $25,000 quote for a mid-size property. The HDMI path is uninteresting to them because it does not create a hardware sale. It is interesting to property managers because the existing DVR already decodes every channel into a multiview grid for the guard monitor. That same signal is the most universal source of video on the property, and one Cyrano device can read up to 25 tiles from it.

Walk to the DVR. Unplug the HDMI cable that runs from the DVR to the guard monitor. Plug that cable's DVR end into Cyrano's HDMI input. Plug Cyrano's HDMI passthrough into the monitor. Connect the device to the network. Map each tile of the multiview grid to a camera label in the dashboard. Total wall-clock time is usually under two minutes. The guard monitor still shows the exact same picture it did before. The AI is now watching it too.

A guard can be physically visible in a parking lot at 11pm. That visible-deterrence value is real for some properties, especially Class A where residents notice. What a contract guard generally cannot do is arrest someone (no powers beyond a citizen's arrest), search anyone, or use force outside of self-defense. So the gap is narrower than people think. The honest answer for most Class B and C properties is to keep a part-time guard for visible presence at peak hours and let software cover the other 22 hours per day.

At one Class C multifamily property in Fort Worth, Cyrano logged 20 incidents in its first 30 days. The list included a break-in attempt, after-hours trespassing in the pool area, package theft from a building lobby, vehicle activity in a fire lane, and loitering in a stairwell. The customer renewed after that first month. That is the actual deployed signal, not a brochure number.

No. Inference runs on the edge device itself, on the property. Video never leaves the building. Only short event clips and metadata go out, which keeps bandwidth low, alert latency around a second or two, and keeps you out of the hairier privacy conversations a cloud-camera deployment creates with residents.

If your DVR has an HDMI port that drives a monitor with a live multiview, it will work. That covers nearly every DVR or NVR shipped in the last decade, including Hikvision, Dahua, Lorex, Swann, Uniview, and the dozens of brands that resell those boards. Cyrano does not care about the brand because it is reading the picture, not the protocol.

Multifamily premiums are up 20 to 40 percent in many markets over the last three years. Several carriers now offer 5 to 15 percent discounts on documented active monitoring. On an $80,000 to $120,000 annual premium that is $4,000 to $18,000 of savings, which on its own usually pays for the system. Ask your broker for the documentation requirements.

Cyrano sends events as text and phone calls in seconds, and many operators route those to a part-time on-call staffer or a low-cost virtual monitoring service that only pays attention when an event fires. That hybrid usually lands around $1,400 to $1,700 per month, half the cost of a nights-only guard, with much better coverage of the property because the cameras catch what a roaming guard physically misses.