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Smoking and mold can cause problems in any rental. But the stakes are higher in long-term housing because people don’t check out after a few nights. They live there.
For years, Minut has helped short-term rental operators detect smoking and mold risk early with privacy-safe monitoring and real-time alerts. Now we’re bringing that to long-term rental housing with Minut Living: smoke and indoor climate monitoring for multifamily and student housing. It helps landlords keep their buildings smoke-free and healthy, with the same privacy-first approach Minut has always taken.
Plenty of buildings advertise themselves as smoke-free, but keeping that promise isn’t easy. A landlord usually finds out about smoking only when a neighbor complains, after they’ve already been exposed to secondhand smoke. Even then, there's little to go on beyond one resident's word against another's.
Smoke’s tendency to travel is a well-documented problem. The CDC estimates up to 29 million residents in multi-unit housing in the US are exposed to secondhand smoke from other units or shared areas within the building, because it moves easily through vents, shafts, even shared walls and corridors.
So a smoke-free policy is important, but it’s only as good as a landlord's ability to uphold it early.
Some buildings have a particle sensor to try to uphold smoke-free policies. In theory, it alerts when someone lights a cigarette. In reality, this sensor can struggle to tell the difference between cigarette smoke and a candle or incense stick. This unreliability is why so many smoke detection systems either miss real events or raise a false alert.
Minut Living is different. It’s equipped with SmokeID, which we built to accurately tell cigarette and cannabis smoke from everyday household smoke. Residents can cook dinner, light a candle or burn incense without setting off an alert, and landlords know that when they do get a notification, they can trust it.
In internal testing, SmokeID correctly identified 87% of smoking events, more than twice as many as the nearest competitor.
A healthy home isn't just smoke-free. Minut Living also measures temperature, humidity and mold risk in every rental unit.
Damp is one of the most common problems in rental housing, and one of the easiest to miss until it shows up as mold on a wall. The EPA notes that mold can cause allergic reactions, asthma attacks, difficulty breathing, and other symptoms. Residents may smell mold but not be able to see it, because it can grow in hard-to-spot places like the back side of wallpaper, the underside of carpets, inside walls, or behind furniture.
To minimize the risk of mold, indoor humidity should stay below 60%, and ideally between 30% and 50%. But that’s hard to do when you can’t see the conditions inside each apartment. With Minut Living, landlords are alerted when temperature and humidity levels point to a problem, so it can be fixed before it affects residents’ health or turns into a costly repair.
Minut is built on a simple idea: the best way to protect privacy is to never collect sensitive data in the first place. That matters even more in someone's home than in a vacation rental, which is why:
An ordinary evening at home is never visible to anyone. Privacy settings in Minut Living are locked, so landlords can’t loosen them.
Building-wide monitoring has long been held back by the buildings themselves: patchy WiFi, thick concrete walls, and battery-powered devices that landlords can't get into homes to recharge. The hardware behind Minut Living was designed around all three.
The Minut E1 is a wired sensor built for residential buildings, so there are no batteries to replace. It can be hardwired, plugged into a standard outlet, or connected. via Power over Ethernet (PoE), so each building can choose what suits it. Setups can be mixed from one rental unit to the next, and installation takes minutes.
Minut Grid connects buildings where WiFi or Ethernet isn't an option. A single Minut G1 gateway runs a long-range network that reaches through concrete and steel, links hundreds of E1 sensors, and connects to the cloud over its own cellular connection. There are no resident WiFi passwords to collect, and nothing stops working when a resident changes broadband provider.
Minut Living is available now for landlords and operators with portfolios from a few dozen rental units and up. Find out more about Minut Living, or request a building assessment and we'll help you find the right setup for every building.
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