Mail thieves were getting creative in the Sundance Community, a large single-family home community in sunny Beaumont, California. At first, they pried open mailboxes, damaging the units in their attempts to get to the documents or packages inside. But after a few months, homeowners started opening their doors in the morning to find the entire mailbox gone, literally pulled out of the ground in the middle of the night. 

“This was really costly,” shared Mitzi Jimenez, a Community Manager for Associa, the property management company for Sundance. Charged with the day-to-day operations and management of Sundance’s 2,005 homes, Mitzi felt responsible for finding a solution that would effectively and affordably address the issue, while also drawing the appropriate boundaries between crime-solving and the property managers’ role.

“We would see a lot of activity on social media where people were posting about mail theft, asking, ‘what is security patrol doing about this?’”

The California neighborhood is home to residents ranging from retirees to young families. Many veterans and former service members make their home there as well.