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Protect Your Property From Noise Complaints With NoiseAware — Everything You Need To Know About Our Product

Noiseaware noise sensor plugged outlet short term vacation rental

Not sure how Noise Monitoring works to protect against noise complaints? Recently, we brought together our noise experts, Stewart and Paul, to host another live webinar. The two of them walked you through a live demo of NoiseAware as well as answered all your questions. They did a great job, so shoutout to them! 

For everyone who wasn’t able to attend the webinar, we’re going to do a quick summary with all the main takeaways. Let’s get started and dive right into it!

NoiseAware: It All Started With Nightmare Guests and 14 Noise Complaints

To start off, let’s go back in time a little, and learn about how the idea for NoiseAware was born.

NoiseAware is the first and only Smart Home Privacy-Safe Noise Monitoring solution. Dave Krauss, one of our co-founders, was actually a very early SuperHost and was in the Top 100 SuperHost Globally 19 times. He had several properties in Dallas and was managing them on his own when one day, back in 2015, he had a couple visiting one of his condos. Dave wasn’t worried because the couple said they were going to have a quiet weekend; instead, what happened was what Dave calls a “Mini-Coachella.” 

There were about 40 people that partied for two straight nights, racking up 14 different noise complaints, which caused the cops to make an appearance to defuse the situation. He was a mile down the road and didn’t know what happened until he visited the property the next week. After getting a cease and desist letter from the rental property management, he was no longer allowed to rent out his condo, which resulted in a significant revenue loss. Instead of giving up, he set out on a mission to find a way to keep hosting.

Dave thankfully met his Co-founder, Andrew Schulz, an electrical engineer from Georgia Tech, and they created NoiseAware. From day one, NoiseAware is known to be the only Privacy-Safe Noise Monitoring solution in the industry. Our Indoor and Outdoor Sensors only look at decibel levels and duration to pick up noise levels kind of how a thermometer picks up the temperature, no listening at all! All of your Noise Data history can be found on our Dashboard. We have a web Dashboard and a Mobile app allowing you to check in on your properties remotely. 

The NoiseAware Indoor and Outdoor Sensor

NoiseAware Indoor Sensor

  • Plugs into any outlet
  • NEW Tamper proof detection technology
  • Quick & simple installation
  • FCC & Safety Certified
  • 100% privacy-safe

NoiseAware Outdoor Sensor

  • Place anywhere outdoors at your property
  • Battery-powered
  • 100% Weatherproof
  • Quick & simple install
  • FCC & Safety Certified
  • 100% privacy safe

Our Indoor Sensor works by connecting to your wifi once it is plugged in. This is crucial to make sure that your sensor is collecting all of your properties’ noise data. Depending on your outlet, you have two options to screw in the sensor. We recommend screwing it in, to get an extra level of protection from people trying to tamper with the sensor. You will always have those people who think that if they mess with it, and outsmart the sensor. You will be immediately alerted if guests are trying to mess with it or if it gets unplugged. NoiseAware: 1 Risky Guest: 0.

Our Indoor Sensor monitors noise in what we call an “Activity Zones,” which are your general living areas where people congregate. Think about it this way. If you were to have people over to your property for some drinks, where would you most likely hang out at your property? That is where you want the sensor placed to get the most accurate noise levels. Our experts have found the best placement of the sensor is usually in a living room. For our Outdoor Sensor, ask yourself the same question and place closest to that area. We have found that putting it near hot tubs, pools, or seating areas in your backyard will be the best place to capture the most accurate noise level. The Outdoor Sensor is a little different than our Indoor since the outdoor one is weatherproof and uses batteries so that you can mount it in the ideal location. To make it even easier to install, the backside of the sensor pops off so you can use screws, adhesives, or ties to place your sensor securely. We want your sensor as secure as possible through different weather conditions.

How do you get the noise data from the Outdoor Sensor? The Outdoor Sensor communicates with your Indoor Sensor to relay all of the data back to your Dashboard. You need an Indoor Sensor for the Outdoor Sensor to work. You can see the data for both sensors on one graph for the property so you can track where the party is moving around your property. What is even better is you can set different thresholds between your Indoor and Outdoor Sensor. When you are inside a house, the walls distort the sound and make sound softer. When you are outdoors, you don’t have walls that will block the sound from traveling to your neighbors. So if you don’t want your neighbors being woken up by loud guests, you are going to want to set the Outdoor Sensor threshold down to a quieter noise level. You don’t wish to unhappy neighbors, do you?

How to Use the NoiseAware Mobile App

There’s nothing worse than getting woken up at 3 AM by a police officer, informing you about a party that just occurred at your vacation rental. But don’t worry! This won’t happen to you! 

The NoiseAware Mobile App offers you peace of mind wherever and whenever! It allows you to check in on your properties quickly, and instead of being the last one being informed of any noise issues at your property, you’ll be the first. Once the Noise level goes over your set threshold, you’ll receive a Noise Alert, that allows you to act quickly, and take care of any noise issues before they become noise complaints. Simply send your guests a friendly text, reminding them of the quiet hours at your property. It couldn’t be any more convenient. NoiseAware Fact: Out of experience, 80% of noise disturbances are resolved within 15 minutes after a simple, friendly text message. How awesome is that?!

Download the NoiseAware Mobile App here:

Google Play Store

Apple Store

Navigating the NoiseAware Dashboard

Are you getting nervous about the young, hip couple that looks like they can turn into risky guests? Don’t sweat it, NoiseAware’s Dashboard is super simple to navigate so that you can check up on your property! Once you login to the Dashboard, you will instantly see if there are any Active Alerts of Noise levels exceeding your customer set noise thresholds. If you see a “1′” for Active Alerts, your young, hip couple may be the risky guests that you suspected. You are going to want to investigate and see what noise data is saying for your property. Right next to the big “1”, it will display the property where the alert has been triggered. Once you click into your graph, you will be able to see what commotion the couple is causing. You will get alerted if they are making enough noise to exceed the noise threshold constantly. This could be several things, playing music too loud, having people over with drinks, throwing a party, anything that makes loud enough noise to exceed your set noise threshold. Since we don’t record anything, all we can tell you is how loud it is within the property, not what is the cause of it.

If you look at your alert and it says that it is detecting tampering, your couple might be trying to unplug or move your sensor. You will want to keep an eye on your alerts, because once you get alerted that they have unplugged your sensor, then your property will no longer have the protection of noise monitoring. This is when you would start to get suspicious of your couple. Then there are the dreaded wifi problems that can be a pain both for you and your guests. Your sensor will detect when the wifi is having problems, so you can swoop in and save the wifi day.

Now you can see the couple has decided to move outside by the different colored dotted lines on your Noise Graph. They want to enjoy their time in your hot tube, good thing your Outdoor Sensors batteries were changed last week when you got an alert telling you the batteries were getting low. The best part about your different sensors within the property is the customizable thresholds! You know that your hot tube is super close to your next-door neighbor’s property line, so the couple needs to be talking at a lower volume than they were inside. You can set your sensor to alert you when the couple goes over a smaller threshold. If you are wanting to relax and have your property manager and their staff taking care of these alerts, you easily can! Your dashboard can have as many people signed into your account, so you don’t have to miss out on your plans if you are alerted.

Understanding Noise Levels: Real Life Examples of What Noise Data Looks Like

Let’s dive a little deeper into it for you to understand our Noise Risk Score and the way our Dashboard works a little more; we’ve prepared some examples of real graphs of the noise data for you!

Our first example is a vacuum cleaner that is running for ten straight minutes in the middle of the day. As you can see, the graph shows a spike for 10 minutes before the noise level at the property is back to normal again. 

Ever wondered how much noise you’re making when you’re leaving for work in the morning? Well, our NoiseAware Sensor can tell you exactly how noisy you’ve been. If you look close enough at the graph, you can see someone is present and moving around at the property.

Here’s how it looks like when a few people are hanging out with light music playing in the background. As you can see, there is enough noise to show that there are people at the property, but it isn’t an issue because it is under any reasonable threshold.

How does it look like when the music is turned up? As the music goes up, the graph shows that we’re getting into the mid-range of the Noise Risk Score (with some fluctuations probably due to louder music).

Depending on the set threshold at your property, this next graph could already show a situation where a Noise Alert is set off. 30 to 40 minutes of constant noise might mean that there is some loud music playing, which could interpret as a party starting to develop at your property. And that means that noise complaints likely are to follow. Make sure to stay alert!

Finally, this would be what full-blown party in action. You can see a ramp-up in noise and then a pretty sustained, high level of noise, once the party starts to get going. As a property manager, as the music begins to ramp up, that’s when you would probably be looking to shoot the guest a text message saying, “Hey guys, I’d like to remind you to be respectful of our neighbors and we do have quiet community hours.” Something to that effect that will get them to pay attention to the noise they are creating and hopefully turn it down to a respectful level.

On all of the graphs, you can see a dotted line, which is your set threshold. You typically will have a threshold of 50 out of 100, which is based on our Noise Risk Score. If you did want to set any thresholds during the day, you could set a high threshold for night time to follow your quiet hours. You might wonder how you can change the threshold. A simple way to change the thresholds is to click on the property and navigate to the “Thresholds” tab. You will see the default NRS levels that we have for a home or a condo/apartment. NRS levels are how we measure the different noise levels. We focus on decibel levels and duration, so you aren’t alerted continuously. You don’t want to be alerted every time someone sneezes! We take the average decibel levels over three minute time periods to get the most accurate noise readings within your property. Then you click on the drop-down arrow next to “Select sensor to edit thresholds,” select the sensor that you want to change the thresholds, and make your specific hours from here.

Here is an actual example of an alert where you can see when the alerts are sent out and when it finally got resolved. The red dotted line shows the Indoor Sensor thresholds, and the green dotted line shows the Outdoor Sensor threshold. As you can see, the noise event stays the whole time indoors, and that is why there is no green graph data.

How Do Our Customers Use NoiseAware:

Protect Your Short-Term Rental From Property Damage:

90.04% of customers use NoiseAware to protect their properties from damages. If there is loud noise within the property, it is a precursor to property damage. A study with one of the largest STR insurance providers in the country has shown that properties that had NoiseAware installed were 1/3 less likely to file dame claims. Isn’t that awesome?

Improving Community Relations as a Short-Term Rental Owner/Manager:

With the amount of criticism towards STRs, it doesn’t seem surprising that 89.63% of the time, NoiseAware is used to improve community relations. Noise is one of the concerns amongst neighbors, HOAs boards, and communities in regards to short term rentals. The three biggest tend to be noise, trash, and parking/traffic. No one wants angry neighbors. Using NoiseAware demonstrates that you’re being responsible and preventing any noise issues with your neighbors from happening, and that means avoiding neighbor noise complaints.

Protect Your Property From False Noise Complaints:

80.74% of our customers use NoiseAware to protect their properties against false noise complaints. If you have neighbors that don’t like being next to a short term rental or you have had noise problems in the past. They might be looking to call the police and get your property shut down, even if the noise is at acceptable levels. Thankfully our Dashboard does store all of your data from every property(s), so you can use this as proof against any false noise complaints. Most of the time, if you let your neighbors know about NoiseAware and how you can store data, you will see the false noise complaints diminish greatly. Having proof and being able to show your neighbors that you can provide any data to them or the police will deter anyone from making these complaints just to get your property shut down.

Vet “Risky” Guests Before They Book Your Property:

How can you prevent bad guests from staying at your property? 76.30% use NoiseAware to help vet “risky” guests. Simply include the usage of privacy safe noise monitoring sensors in your property listing to scare off anyone who is planning on throwing a “Mini-Coachella.” Learn more about guest vetting here!

BONUS — Business Development For Property Managers: 

90% of our larger clients who manage properties professionally, use NoiseAware to show homeowners that they are providing technology that will protect their property against noise 24/7. For Homeowners, their properties are some of their most prized possessions, and they want to know that property managers are doing everything in their power to protect their investments. What better way to show that their property is being protected from noise complaints and potential damage, around the clock, with NoiseAware installed.

Without technology like it, you would have to drive and check on the property. This isn’t feasible if you are managing multiple properties or if your property is located too far away to drive too quickly. For property managers to build credibility with their clients, they are going to need to be able to respond at the moment that things being to get noisy at the property. 

NoiseAware Support Team — We Are Here To Help With All Questions:

We provide live support, a resource center, help center, training videos, rules, regulations, and more. Our live customer support team is the best at understanding your questions and getting them answered as quickly as they can! If you are looking at our website on one of your breaks, don’t worry; our Support team works around your schedule. You can send us your email or phone number to set up a time later or ask for informational videos/articles to be sent your way. Our teams’ goal is to get all of your questions when it is convenient for you. You will find training videos that help you with a sensor set up, text a guest after a noise complaint, including NoiseAware in your listing, etc. You want to provide information about the noise monitoring sensors in your House Rules, so your guests are aware of the device at the property. Being transparent with your guests will deter the risky one from booking your property.

Here are some of the testimonials that our customers have giving for why they believe we are so helpful to them. 

“Finding NoiseAware was a miracle for us. We now have peace of mind that our neighbors have a peaceful neighborhood. Thank you for developing such a simple system!” — Marianne Brunner, Airbnb Host

“We’ve used NoiseAware for years, it’s a fantastic technology for any team who takes guest and resident experience seriously. A no brainer for the professional manager.” — Joe Fraiman, Lyric Cofounder

“It’s like a smoke detector, but for noise, and since we’ve used it, we’ve completely eliminated the neighborhood’s complaints.” — Côme Bardi of Fourtou, Luckey by Airbnb

If you want more information or think NoiseAware can be helpful to you, visit us at noiseaware.io or email sales@noiseaware.io to talk to one of our amazing sales team members! 

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