Most mid-rise building security stops at the ground floor: a gate camera, a lobby camera, sometimes a basement. The staircases, lift lobbies and terrace that residents pass through daily are frequently left uncovered entirely, not because they matter less, but because they are easy to forget during a survey focused on the building's public face.
Why the space between floors gets skipped
Ground-floor positions are obvious - everyone thinks of the gate and the entrance. Upper-floor common areas are easy to overlook because they feel private even though they are shared space, and because covering every floor sounds expensive before anyone has actually worked out what it costs. The result is a building well covered at the ground and effectively unwatched everywhere a resident actually spends time moving between their flat and the outside world.
What actually happens on staircases and in lift lobbies
These are where a disproportionate number of the incidents residents report to us actually occur: a delivery person going floor to floor rather than being buzzed to a specific flat, a dispute between neighbours that escalates in a shared space, an unfamiliar person loitering on a stairwell landing. None of these show up in gate or lobby footage, because by the time somebody reaches an upper floor, ground-level cameras have already lost them.
Terrace access deserves its own thinking
A terrace is often the single most overlooked access point in a mid-rise building - reachable by stairs that may bypass the lift lobby entirely, sometimes with a door that does not lock reliably, and frequently unused enough that an intrusion there goes unnoticed for hours. Terrace access deserves the same access-control thinking as the main gate: who should be able to reach it, and is that actually enforced, or just assumed.
Placement that works without excessive camera count
Covering every floor individually is rarely necessary or proportionate. A workable approach: one camera per lift lobby at ground level plus key upper floors (not necessarily every floor), one covering each staircase entry point rather than every landing, and one at the terrace access door. This concentrates coverage at the points people actually pass through, rather than attempting blanket coverage of every square metre - which both controls cost and avoids the corridor-facing-a-flat-door privacy problem covered elsewhere.
What this changes about your recorder sizing
Adding staircase, lift lobby and terrace coverage to an existing gate-and-lobby system means recalculating retention, not just adding channels - more cameras on the same disk means fewer days of footage across the board unless capacity is increased to match. This is exactly the kind of expansion that should be planned for during the original design, with the recorder sized for the fuller system even if the additional cameras are installed in a later phase.
Common questions
Do we need a camera on every single floor?
Usually not - covering the lift lobby at ground level and a sample of key upper floors, plus every staircase entry point, gets most of the practical value without the cost of covering every landing individually. A survey can tell you which floors genuinely warrant their own camera based on the specific layout and incident pattern of your building.
Is terrace access really a security priority compared to the main gate?
It is a different kind of exposure, not necessarily a bigger one, but it is the one most buildings have never actually assessed. A terrace door that does not lock properly, on a route that bypasses the main lobby, is worth the same deliberate attention as the main gate even though it rarely gets it.
Will adding this coverage significantly increase our AMC cost?
It adds cameras to service, so yes, proportionately - but the marginal cost per additional camera on an existing system and recorder is usually much lower than the cost of the original installation, since the infrastructure and the vendor relationship already exist.