Every building Bridge33 buys comes with someone else's cameras
A commercial real-estate firm with more than 25 assets considered ripping out every inherited camera system and standardising on one brand. It decided that would not have fixed anything.
Bridge33 Capital is a commercial real-estate firm with more than 25 assets across the United States. Each acquisition arrives with a security camera system chosen by the previous owner. Arshad Sultan, its VP of Property Management, describes the brief in Spot AI's published account.
We needed to find a system that would tie together all our cameras in the field and make it easy to monitor our properties with a small, nimble central team.
The case study attributes its opening and closing quotes to Sultan. Several others in between run without a byline, and are treated here as the company's.
Replacing cameras would not have fixed it
The obvious answer was a refresh: rip out every inherited system and standardise on one brand. Bridge33 considered it and rejected it. Even with identical hardware, the account says, the team would still need a different login at each location, "effectively making each site it's own silo."
The company's own summary: "Even refreshing cameras across properties to the same brand wasn't going to solve our problem."
The firm left the cameras in place and put a Spot AI Hybrid Cloud NVR at each site, which works with any IP camera that supports the RTSP standard. The team self-installed each asset, the account says, in minutes, with no port-forwarding or VPN configuration.
Finding out a camera is dead after the incident
A property manager usually learns a camera has failed when something happens and there is no footage. Bridge33 had answered this with a weekly manual audit of every camera, a job the account describes as taking hours.
Live camera health status replaced the audit. The team now gets a notification when a camera goes offline, for how long and why, and a single-click health summary of the whole portfolio. Role-based access handled the other headache: senior management wanting every site, regional teams wanting only theirs.
Spot AI allows us to go from being reactive to being proactive with our physical security. Managing security has been much easier despite a growing portfolio.
Tenant requests
The third problem was tenants. A growing portfolio means more requests for footage of incidents, and native NVR software took hours to search. Sharing the result meant a USB stick.
The company says: "As Bridge33's asset portfolio has grown, so have the number of requests for incident resolution — which increases the burden on our lean team. But we do it to keep our customers happy."
Motion search, a timeline and what Spot AI calls Segment Scrub cut the searching, per the account, from hours to minutes, and one-click sharing replaced the USB stick for law enforcement, insurance investigators and tenants. The verdict on record is short: "It is much faster than using the native NVR software."
The lean-team thesis
The case study's closing claim is that Bridge33 can now direct remote setups with no full-time employee on the ground. Sultan's closing line is about headcount.
We continue to use Spot AI across assets to make it easier for our lean team to manage a large portfolio while maintaining customer satisfaction.
Bridge33 is still buying buildings, and each one still arrives with someone else's cameras. So far the answer has been to leave them where they are and put one recorder in the closet. If you run a portfolio, how many separate logins does it take to see all of it?