The most sensitive thing an owner gives us is not money. It is the ability to walk into their home when they are three thousand kilometres away.
So the rules around it are rigid and deliberately inconvenient. Every key is numbered and held in one place. Every entry is logged with a time and a name. No contractor is ever alone in a property — someone from this office stands there for the duration, including for a twenty-minute job.
It slows us down and costs us money, and both of those are the point. A control that is cheap and quick is usually a control that is not doing anything.
One steward is named to each house and does not rotate. Owners should know whose telephone they are ringing, and after a few years they generally know a good deal more than that.