Build-to-Rent (BTR) operators face an evolving challenge of regulatory compliance in their complex environment. With legislation including the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 and the Building Safety Act 2022, compliance requires continuous monitoring, accurate documentation, and proactive risk management.
Whether they are monitoring purpose-built student accommodation, ensuring compliance across multiple social housing sites, or any number of other Build-to-Rent properties, BTR operators have ongoing pressures to ensure safety, whilst also maintaining operational efficiency across multi-site portfolios. This means that manual systems can become not fit for purpose as they often create blind spots, leading to delays, risk exposure, and frustrated residents.
For BTR operators, traditional spreadsheets and site-by-site reporting can be very long-winded and also create inconsistencies. Without centralised oversight, property managers struggle to consolidate fire safety records, making audits, inspections, and insurer demands unnecessarily time-consuming.
Our intelligent platform centralises every event, test, and device across your entire portfolio - giving BTR operators complete control and proof of compliance at a glance.
There are 2 specific monitoring standards that apply to commercial and build to rent properties specifically.
This code of practice covers the design, installation, commissioning and maintenance of fire detection and alarm systems in multi-occupant, and commercial buildings. It states that:
Fire signals must be successfully transmitted to an Alarm Receiving Centre (ARC) within 90 seconds.
Faults within fire safety systems must be identified and reported to a monitoring centre within 3 minutes.
Protocols must be in place to minimise and manage the number of false alarms within the system.
The responsible person must maintain a complete record of weekly test, fault, and maintenance events across a fire safety portfolio. Either digitally or on paper.
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Drax Technology helps companies to exceed these standards by:
Providing real-time data: in the case of a fire event, our solution captures event data instantaneously, and provides a real-time detailed overview of the exact device that has been triggered. Information of a genuine fire, false alarm, or system fault are provided in real-time, which is well within the regulatory targets of 90 seconds, and 3 minutes.
Automating digital logbooks: There is no need to manually log information. Every alarm event, fire drill, fault alert, and maintenance action is recorded directly into a cloud-based digital audit trail that is secure, and readily available to regulators. This eliminates manual reporting and eliminates the possibility of human error.
Drastically reducing false alarms: Engineers are able to program smart verification rules and predictive maintenance that support a proactive approach to fire safety. Real-time monitoring allows for potential faults to be identified and remedied before a false alarm has the opportunity to trigger.
While BS 8418 is primarily a security standard, it still affects fire safety systems due to Visual Smoke Detection. It states that:
Systems must have 2 independent signal paths for transmitting live footage to a Remote Video Response Centre (RVRC) to ensure that line monitoring cannot be cut.
Image and data activations must transmit within 1 second of detection to allow live operators to verify a threat.
Backup power supplies for cameras and field detectors must maintain operations for a minimum of 4 hours, with device or power failures being reported to the monitoring station immediately.
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Drax Technology provide solutions that meet these requirements by:
Automatically triggering local CCTV cameras: In the event of a fire, the solution can control local CCTV cameras to observe the exact location of the alarm for a live view of what is happening.
Providing immediate visual confirmation: Due to its integration with live video, the monitoring centre can confirm if an alarm event is due to a genuine fire or false alarm within seconds. There is no delay between an alarm activating and the live video being available.
Performing persistent asset health checks: Drax constantly pings and audits the connection status of connected panels, automatically flagging non-compliance issues via a centralised dashboard.
Bringing all your alarms across your whole portfolio into one intelligent platform.
Our solution enables you to detect recurring faults, anticipate risks, and prioritise maintenance before failures occur.
Our solution streamlines multiple daily events into clear, actionable insights, enabling teams to act quickly and decisively.
Generate compliance records instantly, keeping you compliant by providing up to date auditable proof for regulators, insurers and stakeholders.
Continuous monitoring enables facilities managers to have full visibility of every device across their site.
Conventional fire alarm systems trigger alerts, but often show barely any insight into the original cause of the issue. This means that facilities managers remain reactive and have to wait for an issue to occur, instead of preventing them.
With manual logbooks and fragmented reporting, compliance tasks become very time consuming for staff and in turn, leaves room for human error.
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Routine maintenance often becomes reactive instead of proactive. Minor faults can become major issues, driving costs higher and damaging resident trust.
Drax Technology's solutions eliminates these limitations by providing real-time visibility across all fire and life safety systems from a single, intelligent platform. Instead of reacting to alarms, BTR operators gain 24/7 insight into the cause, location, and severity of incidents, enabling faster, more informed decision-making. Automated reporting and digital compliance records eliminate manual paperwork, reducing admin time and the risk of error.
Our solutions seamlessly integrate with all major fire alarm panel manufacturers, so you can have peace of mind with both new and legacy systems.
Track and manage building assets digitally, ensuring compliance with servicing schedules and extending equipment life cycles.
Faults are flagged in real time, allowing early intervention before they escalate into costly risks or safety breaches.
We provide intelligent water monitoring solutions that assists with the reduction of legionella risks, providing further assurance of health and safety compliance.
Full visibility across your portfolio highlights hidden risks and inefficiencies before they escalate into costly problems.
Our solutions seamlessly integrate with all major fire alarm panel manufacturers, so you can have peace of mind with both new and legacy systems.
Track and manage building assets digitally, ensuring compliance with servicing schedules and extending equipment life cycles.
Faults are flagged in real time, allowing early intervention before they escalate into costly risks or safety breaches.
We provide intelligent water monitoring solutions that assists with the reduction of legionella risks, providing further assurance of health and safety compliance.
Full visibility across your portfolio highlights hidden risks and inefficiencies before they escalate into costly problems.
We believe that there are several reasons for picking our fire alarm monitoring systems over our competitors. We have listed them below.
While competitors will often encourage you to use a fire alarm monitoring system that is locked in to a specific fire panel manufacturer. This ultimately leads to you having to report on your fire safety across a number of separate silos. Especially if your portfolio contains multiple properties with existing alarm systems from multiple manufacturers.
Drax Technology removes these reporting barriers by integrating directly with all of the fire panels throughout a fire safety network, regardless of manufacturer. This allows you to report on all fire panels across all of your properties through a single centralised dashboard. To ensure that there is no need for siloed reporting, our fire monitoring system can be seamlessly integrated with over 50 fire alarm manufacturers.
Instead of providing a generic text alert when a fire alarm is triggered, our solution provides users with much more information. By providing floor plan or map information, a precise location for where the fire event is taking place, and suggesting what the best course of action is, our solution cuts out guess work and manual referencing that can lead to longer response times and increased fire damage.
For the majority of manufacturer locked fire alarm monitoring systems, their main focus is on signalling an alarm event and showing it to you. There is no option to interact with the system that has been triggered without doing it in person on-site.
At Drax Technology, we make things easier. Our fire monitoring system allows users to receive a fire alert and take action immediately through remote control. There is often no need to visit the site, especially when dealing with fault alerts and false alarms. An alarm event can be investigated, panels can be reset, and faulty zones can be isolated, without the need to visit a site in person.
Our fire safety solution automatically files every test, fire event, and false alarm, and automatically files it into a secure digital logbook. This removes the need for CSV exports and paper entries that a lot of our competitors make their customers rely on. Instead of having to collate siloed compliance data from each of your separate systems for a regulator to check, with our system you can provide a 100% accurate compliance audit to them in seconds.
Most fire monitoring companies are only interested in telling you when something goes wrong. They wait for a fault in the system or an alarm, and tell you about it after the fact. At Drax we are more interested in allowing engineers to get ahead of failures. Instead of waiting for a fault to cause a false alarm, our smart system alerts an engineer that an asset could be at risk of causing a false alarm, and provides them with recommended next steps. This allows your fire safety approach to become proactive with potential faults being caught early and avoided through remedial maintenance.
Create a centralised view of individual alarm devices and identify fire, pre-alarm, fault and disablement event in real time
Integration with campus panic alarms supports providing immediate help during various emergencies
Integrate your intruder alarms to ensure appropriate resource is deployed quickly
Get alerted when your sprinkler systems are triggered and where you need to ensure quick response times to the event.
Get alerted when your plant alarms are triggered and where you need to ensure quick response times to the event.
Get alerted when your gas alarms are triggered and where you need to ensure quick response times to the event.
Create a centralised view of individual alarm devices and identify fire, pre-alarm, fault and disablement event in real time
Integration with campus panic alarms supports providing immediate help during various emergencies
Integrate your intruder alarms to ensure appropriate resource is deployed quickly
Get alerted when your sprinkler systems are triggered and where you need to ensure quick response times to the event.
Get alerted when your plant alarms are triggered and where you need to ensure quick response times to the event.
Get alerted when your gas alarms are triggered and where you need to ensure quick response times to the event.
