Glenn Felson has published an excellent article on the potential of NFC in smart buildings on PropTech Future. The following text summarizes his key points and enriches them with additional experience and personal perspective.

Digital Access in Smart Buildings

Over recent years, many companies have implemented digital building access systems. Most smart access providers—at least all those I am familiar with—rely on the same technology: Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE).

BLE is a standard feature built into every modern smartphone, regardless of whether it runs iOS or Android. Both Apple and Google allow third-party developers to build solutions using BLE, making it an ideal technology for digital access control. Users don’t even need to open a smart building app—simply being within range of a reader is enough for the door to unlock.

Beyond increased convenience and improved security (transponders and RFID cards can be cloned easily), BLE-based access greatly simplifies access management for tenants as well as asset, property, and facility managers. In the past, every employee had to be met in person to hand over a physical card—and even worse, cards had to be collected again when someone left the company or lost their badge.

A New Game with NFC?

NFC itself is not new technology, but Apple had long restricted its use primarily to Apple Pay. While Android allowed NFC for broader use cases, many companies hesitated to adopt it for access control, as roughly one third of the global population uses an iPhone and would have been excluded.

Now that Apple is allowing developers to build NFC-based access control apps, the game has changed.

BLE vs. NFC

Both technologies come with advantages and limitations. BLE’s key strength is its range: the phone can stay in a pocket or bag, and once it enters a defined proximity, communication with the reader is established and access is granted.

NFC, by contrast, has a very short range—similar to physical access cards. Many people are familiar with this from Apple Pay at supermarket checkouts, where the iPhone or Apple Watch must be held very close to the reader.

What makes Apple’s announcement so impactful, however, is not NFC itself—but Apple Wallet.

Apple Wallet

Apple’s NFC implementation is fully integrated into its digital wallet. Using a digital credential to access your office is only the beginning of Apple’s vision. Ultimately, Apple Wallet is designed to manage all your keys and passes—concert tickets, boarding passes, gym access, and more.

It can also store temporary digital credentials for ad-hoc use cases such as hotel rooms, Airbnb stays, or rental cars. Even visitor badges or temporary access credentials for a client’s office could seamlessly live inside Apple Wallet.

The major advantage: users no longer need dozens of different apps. The wallet alone—and the relevant credential—is sufficient.

This raises a key question:
Will users accept having to hold their phone close to a reader, unlike BLE-based access where the phone can remain in a pocket?
From a user perspective, the underlying technology may be largely irrelevant.

Impact on Smart Building Solution Providers

Does Apple’s “opening” of NFC benefit smart building solution providers—or is Apple about to disrupt this space as well?

If Apple were to remove access control from established smart building platforms entirely, this could become problematic for solution providers. Building access is a fundamental function—one that almost every user needs and one of the primary reasons people download a smart building app in the first place. Losing this key feature would weaken the value proposition of existing platforms.

On the other hand, broader adoption of digital access could further accelerate digitalization in the real estate sector—creating tailwinds for smart building providers that successfully integrate these new capabilities.

It will be interesting to see where this journey leads: how open Apple’s NFC strategy will ultimately be, and whether Apple decides to actively enter the market itself.

One thing is certain: change is coming—and we’ll be following it closely.