What to Put in a Security RFP for an Apartment Community

Describe the property the way an officer will meet it

An RFP for an office building can get away with square footage and a lobby description. An apartment community cannot, because the risk is spread across buildings, breezeways, a perimeter and whatever amenities draw people after the leasing office closes. Name the unit count and building count, whether the property is garden-style, mid-rise or a mix, the number and type of vehicle and pedestrian gates, the pool and clubhouse and their hours, the package room or locker bank, the parking lots or garage, and any history that prompted the search: a run of vehicle break-ins, a pool that draws non-residents, a package room that gets propped open. A bidder who reads that paragraph can price the property; one who reads “312 units, gated” is pricing a guess.

Ask for posts by hours and type, not a total budget

The scope section is where most apartment RFPs go wrong. Asking for “evening security” or setting a monthly number and asking bidders to fit it invites proposals that cannot be compared, because one bidder assumes six hours and another assumes ten. Write the scope as posts: an evening and overnight patrol post from a stated start time to a stated end time, seven nights or a specific set of nights, unarmed unless the property has a reason for armed coverage; a gate post if one entrance needs to be staffed separately from the grounds; a weekend amenity post for the pool season if that applies. Where weekday and weekend patterns differ, price them as separate lines rather than one blended rate, since a Friday and Saturday night at a community with a busy pool deck is a different post than a Tuesday.

Scope element	What to specify
Patrol post	Start and end time, nights per week, foot or vehicle
Gate or lobby post	Hours staffed, and whether it runs alongside a separate patrol
Seasonal or weekend post	Amenity covered, months and days, and whether it stands alone or extends an existing post
Armed vs unarmed	State the assumption for each post so every bid prices the same mix
Temporary or event posts	Move-in weekends, holidays, or a specific incident window, priced separately from the standing posts

Require the license number and the sample documents

Every bidder should provide its Texas Department of Public Safety license number and class before the walk-through, so it can be checked against the department’s public search rather than taken on faith. Ask for a certificate of insurance naming your entity as additional insured, and for a sample daily activity report and a sample set of post orders, redacted if needed. These two documents tell you more about how a company actually runs a post than any paragraph in a cover letter, because they show the level of detail an officer is expected to write down and the structure a supervisor is expected to enforce. A bidder who cannot produce either has probably not run the kind of post you are asking for.

Set a walk-through date, not a submission deadline alone

A bid priced from a site plan or a phone call is a number without a basis. Set a date, or a short window, for bidders to walk the property with a supervisor before pricing it, at the hours the coverage would actually run if that is practical, so the proposal reflects the lighting, the traffic and the layout rather than an assumption. Communities with a pool, a garage or a phased build-out benefit especially from this, since those features change what a post actually takes to cover and rarely show up accurately on a floor plan.

State the reporting cadence you expect

Say, in the RFP, how often you want to receive the daily activity report, who it should go to, and how incident reports should be handled: the same day, with photographs, referenced from the daily report by time. This is a small section but it sets an expectation from the start rather than becoming a negotiation after the contract is signed, and a company’s answer to it tells you something about how seriously reporting is treated internally.

Decide how you will evaluate what comes back

List the criteria the RFP will be judged on before the bids arrive: licensing and insurance in order, the quality of the sample post orders and reports, the supervision plan, the officers proposed and how assignment stability is handled, and price on the stated scope. Communities that skip this step often end up choosing on price alone once the numbers are in front of them, even when the RFP itself asked for more. Writing the criteria down first keeps the comparison honest.

Building the document

The security RFP template for property managers has sections for all of this, from property description through pricing format and evaluation, and can be filled in and sent to more than one bidder as it stands. For the broader question of how to run the hiring process around the RFP, from the first call through the first month of reports, see the hiring checklist. If your community has not yet decided how many posts it actually needs, how many security guards does an apartment community need works through that question before the RFP is written, so the scope section starts from an answer rather than a guess.