Thanksgiving is Thursday, November 26. That is 17 days from this morning. From the Wednesday before it until the first Monday in January, most office buildings in Tarrant County run on a skeleton crew and whatever access control somebody wrote for a full building. Office building security guards in Fort Worth earn their keep in exactly that stretch, because the building empties and the exposure does not.
The calendar is the only new part. Everything else about an office tower in December is a decision somebody either makes in November or discovers in January.
A floor full of people is a security control
Count the people who have a reason to be in your building on a normal Tuesday. Tenants and their staff. Their clients. Cleaning crews. Elevator and HVAC techs. Couriers. The vending route. Landscape. Now remove the tenants and their staff for three weeks.
What is left is a building where nearly every person inside is a vendor, nobody who works there recognizes anyone, and the population that provided passive surveillance is gone.
A floor full of people is the cheapest security control a building has.
It is also the first one to leave, and it leaves on a schedule anybody can read from the parking garage.
Three things get worse at the same time.
Sightlines stop being covered. The tenant receptionist who looked up when the elevator opened is out until January. Nobody is watching the elevator lobby on eleven.
Sound stops meaning anything. A door closing at 7 p.m. in October is one of forty. The same door on December 28 is the only one, and nobody is on the floor to hear it.
Response time stretches. The facilities manager who could reach a floor in four minutes is off, and whoever is covering four buildings instead of one is forty minutes out.
Badge churn is the exposure nobody audits
Every building accumulates credentials faster than it retires them.
Think about what a year adds.
A tenant downsized in March and nine badges went quiet instead of off.
A contractor finished a buildout in July and somebody still has the dock card.
An IT vendor got a 30-day badge in September for a cutover that took four days.
A terminated employee turned in a badge and kept the garage fob, because those are two systems administered by two different people.
None of that is a theft. All of it is an unreconciled list, and the list is longest in November.
The fix costs an afternoon. Pull the full credential list, including garage fobs and after-hours elevator codes, and make every tenant confirm its own names in writing. Not a verbal nod from an office manager. A dated, signed list. Then deactivate everything nobody claimed, before the building goes quiet rather than after somebody walks a floor on December 29.
The dock and the stairwell do the damage
Most loss in a commercial office building does not come through the front door, because the front door is the one control everybody thinks about.
The loading dock is the real entrance. It is propped for deliveries, it is at grade, it opens into a service corridor with no finished sightlines, and the freight elevator next to it reaches every floor. A dock held open for four minutes is a building with no perimeter for four minutes, and in December it gets held open more, by more people, with less supervision.
The stairwell is the other one. Stair doors latch toward the stair in most buildings, which means somebody in the stairwell can move between floors unobserved and test office doors on each one. Nobody is in the stairwell in December. Nobody is on the floors either.
Then there is what sits on the floors. Monitors, docks, laptops left in drawers, tenant equipment staged for a January install. That is inventory, and somebody can move it in volume on a freight elevator, at night, over three weeks, in a building where no alarm is set because a cleaning crew is still working somewhere.
Office building security guards in Fort Worth cover what a camera records
A camera answers what happened. An officer answers what happens next. In an empty building that difference is most of the value.
A covered post does four things a recording cannot. It puts a person in the dock when the dock is open. It walks the stairwells and the floors on a schedule nobody outside can predict. It challenges the person on eleven at 9 p.m., which is a question a camera cannot ask. And it produces a written record, with checkpoints and times, that the manager reads on the way in rather than pulls after a loss.
We don't post warm bodies. We deploy trained officers behind a real threat assessment. Our field managers came up in private security, our leadership came out of twenty years of military intelligence work, and that is why our post orders read like an operations plan instead of a checklist.
Sunset in Fort Worth is now about 5:32 p.m. Every after-hours round happens in full dark until March, and coverage written for September hours does not match that.
What this means for your building
Four things worth doing in the next two weeks, before the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.
Get the credential list reconciled in writing, tenant by tenant, including garage and after-hours codes. Deactivate what nobody claims.
Decide who is responsible for the dock while the building is light, by name and by shift. "Whoever is around" is not a decision, and the dock is where the perimeter actually is.
Collect the holiday closure schedule from every tenant, in writing, and build coverage against the gaps rather than against the calendar. The week between Christmas and New Year's Day is not one block. It is five different buildings on five different days.
Walk the building after dark, at the hour it is actually empty, with whoever answers the phone at 2 a.m. If that person is a voicemail box, that is the finding.
Where the exposure is a parking deck rather than a floor plate, see our post on parking garage security guards in Fort Worth. For space empty longer than a holiday, see vacant property security in Fort Worth.
Get Your Building Covered
Tell us the address, the rentable square footage, and your tenants' closure dates. We will walk it after dark and quote against the gaps.
Call (817) 480-2291 or email info@thirteenalpha.com.
Thirteen Alpha Solutions LLC, 4364 Western Center Blvd #2105, Fort Worth, TX 76137. TX DPS Class C License #C31017501.
