Bureau Alarm Monitoring that pays you every month
Bureau monitoring lets you sell professional alarm monitoring as part of your own business. Alarm Watch bills you a wholesale rate for every connection, you invoice your customer at your own price, and the margin is yours to keep. Around 80,000 alarms are monitored across New Zealand, so every install and service call is a chance to win your share.
Every monitored alarm you add stacks a little more income on top, month after month.
What is bureau alarm monitoring?
It is a straightforward wholesale arrangement. You sell alarm monitoring to your customers under your own brand, and our monitoring centre does the work behind the scenes. We invoice you a wholesale rate for each monitored connection. You invoice your customer with your mark up applied, so you set the price and keep the difference.
You may also hear the same model called dealer monitoring, dealer alarm monitoring, re-seller alarm monitoring or wholesale alarm monitoring. The names vary across the industry, but the arrangement is the one described on this page.
Adding a connection is as simple as asking the question while you are installing a new alarm or servicing an existing one. Once the alarm is programmed to report to us, the ongoing income largely takes care of itself.
The bureau sales cycle
Monitoring requested
Your customer wants their alarm monitored and contacts their local installer. That is you.
Alarm programmed
You program the alarm to report to the Alarm Watch monitoring centre.
Wholesale invoice
We invoice you a monthly wholesale rate for the monitoring.
Your invoice
You invoice your customer with your mark up applied. The price is yours to set.
You get paid
Your customer pays you for the monitoring, and the margin stays with your business.
Steps 3 to 5 repeat every month for as long as the customer stays monitored.
Ten benefits of re-selling alarm monitoring
More than 150 New Zealand installers already run a bureau with Alarm Watch. Here is why they do it.
Repeating income
Once a connection is set up, the ongoing work sits with us. Set up a repeating invoice and the margin arrives every month while our operators look after the monitoring.
Customer engagement
Monitoring keeps you in front of your customer long after the install. When batteries, servicing or upgrades come around, you are the company they think of first.
A one stop shop
Your customers deal with one business for all of their security needs. That convenience builds loyalty, and it stops another monitoring centre winning service work off the back of your install.
A more valuable business
An installation company is hard to price when the owner walks out the door with the relationships. A book of monitored connections is proven, transferable income, and buyers pay more for that certainty.
Stop giving customers away
Send a customer off to arrange their own monitoring and you hand roughly $2,200 to someone else. A monitoring centre might pay you around $600 for a new connection, and with the average customer staying about seven years, your own invoicing would earn around $1,600 in margin over that time.
Cash flow through the quiet months
Installation work rises and falls through the year. A bureau base keeps money arriving every month and helps you ride out the slow patches.
Sell up but keep the bureau
When you are ready to hand over the day to day, you can sell the installation side of the business, keep the monitoring book, and collect the repeating income while you get on with your next adventure.
Your brand out front
We can represent your business whenever we deal with your customers. Calls answered in your company name, with reports and the web portal carrying your logo. Your customers see your brand the whole way through.
Know about faults before they do
When an alarm reports a fault, we know straight away and so do you. Getting in touch before the customer has noticed looks professional, wins service work and heads off bigger problems later.
Two customers from one move
When a monitored customer moves house, they contact you to update the details. That is your opening to secure their new property, and to sign up the new owners moving into the old one, where your alarm is already on the wall.
Their new home
A fresh install and another monitored connection for your bureau.
Their old home
Your alarm is already installed. Sign the incoming owner up to monitoring too.
What happens when an alarm activates
Your customers are looked after by trained operators in our New Zealand monitoring centre, day and night. This is the process behind every activation.
Alarm triggered
A sensor activates and the alarm signals our monitoring centre.
Alert received
The signal enters the priority queue and is allocated to an operator based on urgency.
Response initiated
The operator works through your customer's agreed instructions and takes action. It usually goes one of two ways.
Customer attends
The customer attends or arranges attendance, either pre-agreed or when we call them.
A guard is dispatched
If the customer wants it, we send a guard to check the cause of the activation.
Further assistance
The guard or customer reports back to the operator, who can arrange whatever comes next: a glazier, a technician or the Police.
Why installers choose Alarm Watch
New Zealand owned and operated, and looking after monitored alarms for more than two decades.
Bureau monitoring questions
What is bureau alarm monitoring?
Is bureau monitoring the same as dealer monitoring?
Who owns the customer relationship?
How much can I earn from bureau monitoring?
How do I become an Alarm Watch bureau installer?
Start building your bureau
Signing up is simple and the first connection is easier than you might think. Talk to Dave Kuypers, our Bureau Manager. He looks after our re-sellers and will walk you through it.
More for installers: Why Alarm Watch? · Video Verification · AW Connect