I live in a block in S London, in pretty much exactly the same situation
as
the OP. I am also a director of the management company, and we have
discussed a barrier or remote gates etc. The cost of something that looks
even remotely in keeping with the block and doesn't make it look like the
entrance to a factory, is prohibitive (i.e. £12K plus).

When we looked at automatic gates, we had to also consider access for
legitimate visitors such as the milkman, postman, delivery drivers etc, as
well as doctors and emergency vehicles, and legitimate residents'
visitors.
The only answer to that was an entryphone system wired to every property
(in
our case 9 flats plus 6 houses). Very, very expensive. Then there was the
fairness issue - should residents without cars have to pay? What about the
annual maintenance? What about the people who rented garages in the block
which are no longer 'attached' to the numbered property they originally
went
with? It was insoluble.

How much would it cost to simply install an automatic barrier that opened to
anyone driving up to it (which some sort of failsafe system meaning it could
be manually opened if something went wrong) ? You could wire this up to a
CCTV system, which would only activate when someone activated the barrier,
thus only having videos to watch through for times when people actually
drove in. The security video could be sped up, just so someone could watch
it each day to check that each car parked contained someone actually going
into the flats. Would probably take 2-3 minutes max each day, and you could
probably have some sort of rota system. Ok, it wouldn't prevent people
coming and parking, but you'd easily know which ones were the ones that
didn't have a right to be there.

--
Peter
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