10 location limit in the ST app

Apps & Clients
4

We have a wide range of hosts managing from a few properties to over a hundred properties using Rental Lock Automater (RLA) or a custom integration like Lock Manager API (LMAPI).

This current 10 limit does seems a little arbitrary (I believe the IDE has a limit of up to 100 locations). As Garrett mentioned, here are the strategies that hosts use to get around this issue:

  1. Create additional locations from the IDE (they way you’re currently doing) and only invite staff who need access to specific properties using their staff accounts (keeping the total under 10 per staff member)
  2. Create a SmartThings account only for property management, create more than 10 locations using the IDE and share that account with all staff (keep in mind if your staff is using your phone as a mobile presence sensor in SmartThings, you may have some trouble with presence sensing here since the same account is being used on multiple phones, I think this issue was addressed in a recent update to the app where each phone on the same account shows up separately)
  3. Create multiple accounts and use multiple phones; this opens up options for you and your staff. For example if one staff member is handling 17 properties, (s)he can have 2 accounts/phones, with 10 locations one and 7 on the other. You can still have all the locations on your master account using the IDE workaround but have multiple phones for your staff who need more than 10 locations using separate individual accounts.
  4. If you’re using an app like LMAPI to integrate your SmartThings properties with your own systems then the limits don’t apply as LMAPI will interface directly with your own property management systems and you can manage them all from a single property management system (or custom app if you have one).

We don’t advise adding multiple hubs to a single location as we’ve seen it cause problems in the past and if you have a problem can multiple devices/hubs which means a lot more work redoing the entire setup again. It’s best to limit it to one hub per location (atleast for now).
You can always add repeaters to extend your mesh size if needed. Practically speaking I’ve seen hosts use a single hub to manage 10 properties in a single building using only repeaters with RLA.

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