What is a smart lock?

But, if you’re new to the world of smart door locks or smart home technology in general, it can be quite confusing. So, the home security experts at Yale are here to help demystify the world of smart locks, highlighting what they are, how they can work for you, and the different options available to suit your lifestyle.

What is a smart lock?

If you’re new to the world of smart home technology, you may never have considered a smart lock before. But smart door locks are a great first step into the world of connected products, allowing you to remotely control your door from afar.

In short, a smart lock gives homeowners the opportunity to remotely control and monitor who’s coming and going through their door via a smartphone, providing the ultimate control over their home security.

Alongside offering keyless entry to the home, high quality smart locks on the market, such as those from Yale, also allow homeowners to easily grant virtual keys to family, friends and trusted service professionals. This handy functionality allows homeowners to have complete control over who has access to their front door via a smartphone app, ensuring they can revoke virtual keys just as quickly as they were created.

As we’ll explore later on in this smart lock guide, when investing in a smart lock from a well-known, trusted security brand, you can also ensure that the gadget can provide just as much security as a standard cylinder lock. Smart locks aren’t just a way to improve the look and convenience of your door, but many high-quality options on the market also have security credentials in place to protect against a range of physical and cyber-attack methods.

These security ‘seal of approvals’ offer peace of mind to homeowners, helping to reassure them that their home is protected whilst also allowing them to check in anytime, anywhere via a smartphone.

What do smart locks do?

As we’ve already highlighted in this guide, smart locks provide homeowners with a wide variety of benefits to ensure that their daily life runs just that little bit more smoothly. Our experts would consider that the main three benefits of smart door locks include convenience, peace of mind and heightened security.

But smart locks can offer much more than that too. Smart locks have been designed to give homeowners full control over their door security, ensuring that they know exactly who’s coming and going from their home and when.

Create virtual keys

One of the most popular uses for a smart lock is the ability to create and revoke virtual keys for guests, giving temporary or long-term access to chosen individuals. This is a handy functionality for busy families or working professionals that are away from the home regularly, allowing them to grant access to their home remotely.

Whether it’s a trusted friend or relative, a tradesperson or dog walker, for example, a homeowner can easily create a virtual key via their smartphone from anywhere at any time to give these people quick and easy access to their home. And just as quickly as the keys are made, they can easily be revoked, offering short-term access to, for example, tradespeople who need to visit your home when you’re out and about, but don’t require access after this. This control is something no traditional lock could offer, making smart door locks safe and secure for you and your family.

This functionality is also handy if a homeowner is regularly travelling for business or leisure. Leaving your home unattended for days, if not weeks on end can put your home in a vulnerable position to burglary, so it’s worth having a trusted friend or family member check in on your home whilst you’re away.

Granting these virtual keys can allow homeowners to have the flexibility to remotely send keys to their home via an app from anywhere at any time, making the need for physical keys a thing of the past.

Monitoring your door security

With physical keys, you also don’t have the ability to know who has entered your home and when they entered. But, by introducing a smart lock into your security system, you can easily track who’s coming and going through the app’s audit trail.

Knowing the comings and goings of people to your home is an essential part of keeping your home safe, and mechanical keys can offer physical protection, but not the additional peace of mind that smart locks can.

The same can be said when you move into a new house, as you very often don’t know who has had access to your home in the past. Whether that’s previous owners’ family and friends or even any spare keys they may have stored away safely, when you first get the keys to your home, you don’t know exactly who may have had access to the property in the past.

By upgrading to a smart lock, you can quickly remove this worry and easily control who can enter your home and when. Most high-quality smart door locks have an easy-to-use smartphone app that can clearly show to users who has accessed their front door and specifically at what time. This functionality ensures homeowners can always be ‘in the know’ over their door security, providing peace of mind and complete control.

Being notified

As with being able to monitor who’s coming and going, being notified of movement in and out of your home as and when it happens is key to be fully in control over your door security.

Most smart locks offer real-time notifications via a smartphone app, allowing homeowners to track who and when people are gaining access to their home. For busy parents, the notification can show that their child has got home safe and sound from school, or let a working professional know that the dog walker has let themselves in to take their much-loved pet for a walk.

This is again something no mechanical lock could ever provide, ensuring that homeowners are always informed over who is entering their home, for the ultimate peace of mind.

Remote locking and unlocking

Peace of mind is another essential part of investing in smart home products, and a smart lock also offers similar benefits.

“Did I lock the door on my way out?” is a phrase we’ve all said or heard at least once in our lifetime, and it can cause a lot of worry for homeowners if they’ve headed out to work for the day, or even a holiday for a week abroad.

Smart locks can quickly remove this concern for homeowners, simply with the tap of an app. Not only is it a case of checking if your door is locked, most high-quality smart locks, like those from Yale, can even be remotely locked or unlocked, allowing full control over your door anytime, anywhere.

Having the ability to remotely check if your door is locked is a great way of giving homeowners the full control to be completely ‘in the know’ over their home’s security. The peace of mind that the simple tapping of an app can do to ensure your front door is locked and secure is invaluable, making it a must-have gadget for smart home fanatics across the globe.

Lost keys are a thing of the past

A particular age-old security issue that comes with standard mechanical keys is the worry of misplacing or losing them. A lost key can cause considerable worry and concern for homeowners, as you never know where or who it may end up with.

This is where smart locks offer the complete flexibility to provide temporary access to a property with just the touch of a button, putting you firmly in control over your home security.

Most high-quality smart door locks showcase the range of keys that have been created for trusted users, allowing you to quickly revoke access if anything changes. This isn’t the same as a traditional key, as once a physical copy of your house key has been given to someone else, they are solely responsible for looking after it. Not only that, if you decide you no longer want them to have your house key, it’s certainly not as easy to get that key out of their possession.

This control is one of the many security benefits of investing in a smart lock and similarly offers the same protection when it comes to losing keys. It’s impossible to lose a key with a smart lock, as any access credentials, including apps, key fobs, key cards or phone tags, can quickly have their access revoked in seconds. This ensures that if in any circumstance an access credential is lost, this can quickly become redundant and therefore ensure no ‘keys’ end up in the wrong hands.

No need to change the locks

When moving into a new house, our security experts often highlight the importance of changing or upgrading your locks. This is because you can never be 100% sure who has previously had access to your home, so it’s worth changing the locks to ensure that you and your family are the only ones who can now gain entry to your new property.

The same can be said for misplaced keys, as sometimes homeowners decide to change the locks again if keys are lost to ensure that their property is fully secured. But when you invest in a smart lock, there’s no need to worry about changing the locks again.

As mentioned earlier in this guide, the great thing about smart locks is that keys can be quickly revoked if they are missing, lost or misplaced, and can be done so via an intuitive app. Therefore, changing the locks becomes an unnecessary task, as the security of your smart lock never needs to be upgraded to a different locking system.

With smart locks offering heightened security and protection too, this ensures that, when investing in smart lock technology, homeowners can be assured that their home is secured with the latest security credentials.

For more advice, support or expertise on smart locks, or to explore the range of trusted smart locks from Yale, please visit our smart locks page.