You have 21 days to inspect an asset where you cannot legally enter 300 of the 312 doors.

Because the residential multifamily asset class is defined by tenancy. At list, the property is almost always 90 to 96 percent occupied, every unit has a lease in force, and the buyer's right of entry is governed by the tenant's lease, not the seller's goodwill. The buyer during a 21 day inspection window typically gets into 3 to 8 vacant or notice to vacate units, and every occupied unit is off limits except for common area scope (HVAC, roof, envelope, meter runs). The asset the buyer cannot walk is bigger than the asset they can. Common area video is the only continuous behavioral record of the part they cannot inspect through a door.

They can inspect: vacant units on turn (3 to 8 typically), the lease files, the rent roll, estoppels that came back, the T-12, the PCA envelope and site scope, the boiler, the roof, the electrical panel, the meter room, the amenity areas (pool, gym, dog run), and the office itself. They cannot inspect: inside any unit with a signed lease and a tenant in residence, which is all the other ~290 to 297 units. The behavioral reality of the building, how people move, who tailgates the gate at 2am, whether the dumpster gets dumped into by non residents, whether the pool gate actually latches, is only observable from the common area cameras. That is the asset the HDMI tap reads.

Cyrano plugs into the HDMI output of the DVR already in the office closet. That HDMI output carries the 4x4 or 5x5 multiview of whatever cameras the DVR is recording. The multiview is almost entirely common areas, parking, dumpster, mailroom, pool gate, dog run, leasing office lobby, breezeways, because that is what multifamily cameras cover. Cyrano decodes each tile, masks the DVR's rendered chrome (clock, camera name strip, channel bug) with a brand specific overlay mask, classifies what it sees (vehicle_dwell, loiter, tailgate, package_pickup, person_in_zone), and writes a 9 field event record plus a 480x270 JPEG thumbnail. 21 days of tap on a 16 tile multiview produces roughly 4,900 indexed events. Every event has a tile.label, a timestamp, and a coordinate. The buyer has a behavioral log of common area activity without ever crossing a leased threshold.

The fields are tile.label, tile.index, tile.coords, property, layout_id, overlay_mask, event_class, iso8601_ts, and latency_ms. That shape matters because it is identical across recorder brands. The DVR in the closet might be a 2017 Hikvision DS-7716NI-K4, a Dahua XVR, a Lorex NVR, an Amcrest, a Reolink, a Uniview, a Swann, a Night Owl, a Q-See, an ANNKE, an EZVIZ, a Bosch DIVAR, a Honeywell Performance, or a Panasonic WJ-NX. Every one of them stamps its own UI chrome on the HDMI output. Cyrano's overlay_mask field says which brand template it applied. That means a buyer acquiring a 6 asset residential portfolio with 6 different DVR brands gets one 9 field table back, not 6 proprietary exports. Portfolio level inspection becomes a single filter, not a week of site visits.

Second order signal. If the tile labeled Mailroom Interior shows a loiter event spike every Wednesday afternoon, that is not an in unit issue, but it is a package theft exposure the buyer inherits. If the tile labeled Breezeway B3 shows 14 after hours tailgate events in 21 days, that is a common area security posture that correlates with resident complaints and with GL insurance loss ratios. If the tile labeled Pool Gate shows zero events for 7 straight days while adjacent tiles are active, the camera is dead. Every one of those signals shows up in the operating pro forma post close. The buyer cannot inspect inside unit 312, but the buyer can inspect what walks past unit 312 at 11pm. That is frequently the more diagnostic data.

Cooperation is minimal. The unit plugs inline on the cable that runs from the DVR's HDMI output to the wall monitor in the office. No DVR credentials are requested, no DVR settings change, no ports are forwarded, no recorder access is granted. The wall monitor still shows the same tiled multiview it always did. Seller counsel occasionally asks for language in the access addendum confirming the tap is read only and the DVR is untouched. That language is standard. 72 hour taps through 21 day taps have both been run during inspection windows. The longer the tap, the richer the behavioral log at LOI close.

Agency lenders increasingly ask for a security plan as part of the loan package. Historically that has been a narrative document. A 21 day tap produces an exportable PDF with charts by event_class, a CSV for the servicer, and thumbnails for any flagged event. Lenders find the standardized shape easier to audit than a raw DVR timeline. It is not a substitute for the lender's own checklist, but it is a strong supplement and it fills the operational section of the package that buyers often struggle to produce for occupied transfers where they cannot produce their own site walk photos of every camera view.

Three reasons. First, most residential multifamily DVRs are behind NAT on the property's ISP with no port forwarding configured and no remote admin credentials that still work. RTSP from outside the property is effectively unavailable. Second, even on property, the DVR may have RTSP disabled, ONVIF credentials lost with the last property manager, and camera firmware versions that predate modern authentication. Third, the HDMI output is a passive signal. Every consumer and commercial DVR produces it for the wall monitor. It is there, it works, and reading it does not require the seller's IT to recover anything. For residential multifamily where the DVR was installed by a handyman in 2018 and the handyman is not returning calls, HDMI is the only layer you can count on.

21 days on a 16 tile multiview produces around 4,900 indexed events. That is enough to see the full weekly cycle (weekday vs weekend), the package cycle (Wed, Fri peaks), and one full operating two week period of the property. It is not enough to see seasonal variation, and it is not enough to see the 30 day insurance renewal window a lender typically asks for. For that, the common playbook is to acquire and leave the unit running, which gives the new owner 30, 60, 90 day post close extensions on the same 9 field schema. The pre close log and the post close log are continuous because the shape does not change between ownership.

Most keep the unit plugged in. The hardware is $450 per property one time, the subscription is $200 per month per property, and the unit transfers with the asset at close. Post close, the tile.label events continue to accrue and the buyer now has a continuous timeline from 21 days pre close through the full hold period. That continuity is what makes the day one incident log queryable against the last week pre close, which no DVR UI supports natively. A few buyers unplug the unit and redeploy it to the next acquisition. Either choice works, and nothing in the hardware is tied to the recorder brand in any specific closet.

An inspector walk is a point in time observation of roughly 4 to 6 hours. A 21 day tap is a continuous observation of 504 hours. The inspector writes a narrative; the tap writes a 9 field event log with timestamps and thumbnails. The inspector costs $1,500 to $3,500 per property. The tap is $450 one time plus the subscription. The inspector is useful for envelope, roof, and mechanical. The tap is useful for common area behavior. Most buyers doing occupied residential multifamily transfers now use both, because they answer different questions. The inspector cannot tell you who came through the pool gate at 2am on a Thursday. The tap cannot tell you if the roof flashing is lifting. Different tools for different scopes.