Last Christmas week, a property manager on Summer Avenue came back to work on January 2 and found three of her strip mall units with shattered rear windows. The thieves had taken HVAC copper from two units and every piece of electronics from a tax preparation office that hadn’t bothered to lock its filing cabinets. Total loss across the three businesses ran past $40,000. The break-ins happened on December 27, five days after the tenants closed for the holidays. Nobody noticed until the new year.
That story repeats itself across Memphis every December. Businesses shut down for extended holiday breaks. Properties sit dark and empty, sometimes for ten straight days between December 23 and January 2. For anyone looking for an easy target, there’s no better window.
If you manage commercial property in Shelby County, the next two weeks are when your security plan either works or it doesn’t. Here’s what needs to happen before your tenants lock up and leave.
The Holiday Crime Pattern in Memphis
Property crime in Memphis follows seasonal rhythms, and the Christmas-to-New-Year gap is one of the highest-risk periods of the year. MPD data consistently shows an uptick in commercial burglaries during the last week of December. The pattern makes sense. Businesses are closed. Foot traffic disappears. Alarm response times stretch because fewer employees are available to verify alerts.
Certain corridors take the worst of it. The Lamar Avenue stretch between Shelby Drive and Park Avenue has been a consistent hotspot for commercial break-ins, especially in the older strip malls where rear access points face unlit alleys. Summer Avenue from Highland to Mendenhall sees similar problems, particularly in the small retail and service businesses that make up most of that corridor’s tenant mix.
Industrial properties along Airways Boulevard and in the warehouse districts near the Memphis International Airport carry a different risk profile. These facilities often store high-value equipment and materials. Copper theft from HVAC systems and electrical infrastructure remains a persistent problem in vacant or semi-occupied industrial buildings. Scrap copper prices have stayed elevated through 2025, and that keeps the incentive strong for thieves willing to strip a building’s mechanical systems overnight.
The Memphis Safe Task Force presence has suppressed violent crime in several of these areas, and its visible patrols create a deterrent effect that benefits commercial properties too. Still, the task force is focused on violent offenders and federal warrants. Property crime prevention remains primarily the responsibility of business owners, property managers, and whatever private security arrangements they’ve put in place.
Alarm Systems: Test Them This Week, Not Next
The single most common failure point during holiday break-ins isn’t that businesses lack alarm systems. It’s that the systems malfunction, and nobody catches it before the building goes empty.
Contact your alarm monitoring company before December 23. Confirm that all zones are reporting correctly. Walk the building and trigger each sensor: door contacts, motion detectors, glass break sensors. If any zone shows a fault, get a technician out now. Alarm companies are swamped during the holidays, and scheduling a service call on December 26 is almost impossible.
Update your key holder list with the monitoring company. This matters more than people realize. When an alarm triggers at 2 a.m. on December 28, the monitoring center calls the contacts on file. If the first three numbers go to voicemail because those employees are visiting family in Nashville or Atlanta, the response chain breaks. Make sure at least two contacts are reachable every day during the closure. Give the monitoring company a backup number for someone who can authorize police dispatch without needing to drive to the property first.
If your system has cellular backup, verify that the SIM card is active and the signal strength is adequate. Landline-based systems are increasingly unreliable, and phone line cuts remain a tactic used by smarter burglary crews. A system that relies solely on a physical phone connection is a system that can be defeated with a pair of wire cutters in 30 seconds.
Lighting: The Cheapest Deterrent That Actually Works
A dark building at 9 p.m. on December 28 tells everyone passing by that nobody’s home. A well-lit building with interior lights on timers creates at least the appearance of activity.
Program interior lights on staggered timers. Don’t put every light on the same schedule. A building where every light snaps on at 6 p.m. and shuts off at 11 p.m. looks automated. Stagger the timing: some lights come on at 5:30, others at 6:15, a few stay on all night. Mix it up by floor or zone if you can.
Exterior lighting is even more critical. Make sure parking lot lights are functioning and aimed correctly. Check that rear and side entry points have adequate illumination. Most commercial burglaries happen at the back or side of a building, not the front. If your rear loading dock area is a pool of shadows, fix that before the holiday break.
Replace burned-out bulbs in exterior fixtures now. LED replacements for commercial fixtures are cheap and draw minimal power. There’s no reason to leave dark spots around your building during the highest-risk week of the year.
Camera Systems: Review, Don’t Just Record
Having cameras is one thing. Having cameras that produce usable footage is another.
Log into your system this week and check every camera feed. Clean the lenses if they’re exterior-mounted, because a month of December grime can turn a sharp image into a useless blur. Verify that recording storage has enough capacity to cover the full closure period. If your DVR overwrites footage on a 7-day loop and your building will be closed for 10 days, you have a gap. Extend the retention settings or add storage.
Check camera angles. Over time, cameras get bumped, brackets loosen, and the field of view drifts. A camera that was aimed at your rear door in March might now be showing ten feet of blank wall. Spend an hour verifying that every camera is recording what you need it to record.
If your system supports remote viewing, test the mobile app or web interface from off-site. Make sure you can pull up live feeds from your phone. If an alarm triggers during the holidays, being able to check cameras remotely before sending someone to the property saves time and helps you give MPD better information when you call.
Patrol Services and Physical Security
For properties that justify the expense, contracted security patrols during the holiday period are worth considering. A marked patrol vehicle driving through your parking lot two or three times per night creates a visible deterrent and generates documentation that can matter for insurance claims if something does happen.
Several Memphis-area security companies offer holiday-specific patrol packages. Typical arrangements involve random patrol checks during overnight hours, with officers performing perimeter inspections and documenting conditions at each visit. Expect to pay between $25 and $75 per patrol check depending on the scope and the company.
If you already have a security contract, confirm your holiday schedule with the provider now. Some companies reduce staffing during the holidays, which means fewer available officers and longer gaps between patrol rotations. Ask specifically: how many checks will your property receive each night between December 23 and January 2? Get it in writing.
For properties in the Airways Boulevard industrial corridor or the warehouse areas near Democrat Road, consider coordinating with neighboring businesses on shared patrol coverage. A single patrol contract that covers three or four adjacent properties is more cost-effective than separate agreements, and the officer’s presence benefits everyone on the block.
Key Holder Protocols and Emergency Access
Who can access your building during the holidays? That question has a security answer and a liability answer, and they’re both important.
Maintain a current key holder list that includes names, phone numbers, and authorization levels. Your alarm company needs this list. Your security patrol company needs it too. If MPD responds to a burglary alarm at your property and can’t reach anyone to confirm whether the alarm is legitimate, the officers will clear the call and move on. They can’t stand outside your building for an hour waiting for a callback.
Limit key distribution before the break. If you have ten employees with building keys and eight of them won’t be working during the holidays, collect those keys or at minimum confirm that each person understands they’re not to access the building without coordination. Unexplained after-hours access triggers false alarms, and false alarms erode your monitoring company’s response priority over time.
If your property uses electronic access control, review the access logs from the past month. Look for any credentials that shouldn’t be active: former employees, expired contractor badges, duplicate cards. Deactivate anything that doesn’t need to be live during the closure period. Reactivate in January when everyone returns.
Coordinating with MPD
MPD runs a vacation watch program for residential properties, and some precinct commanders extend similar courtesy checks to commercial properties on request. It’s worth a phone call to your local precinct. The officers assigned to the Lamar or Airways station areas know which businesses close for the holidays and will often add them to their patrol awareness without a formal request.
With the Memphis Safe Task Force still active through this period, certain neighborhoods have a higher law enforcement presence than usual. Properties in areas where the task force has concentrated operations benefit from that increased visibility. If your commercial property sits in or near a task force patrol zone, the deterrent effect works in your favor even if the task force isn’t specifically watching your building.
Report any suspicious activity immediately during the closure period. If a neighbor or passerby calls you about someone poking around your building at midnight, don’t wait until morning to check. Call MPD’s non-emergency line or 911 depending on the situation. Property crimes that are reported in progress have a dramatically higher clearance rate than those discovered days later.
The January Return Checklist
When your tenants come back after the new year, the first hour matters. Walk the property before anyone enters. Check every exterior door and window for signs of forced entry. Look at the roof access points. Check the mechanical room and HVAC equipment for signs of tampering or theft. Review alarm system logs for any events during the closure.
If anything looks wrong, don’t enter. Call MPD and wait. A burglar who was interrupted might still be inside, and the liability of sending an employee into that situation isn’t worth the risk.
Document the property’s condition with photos and video on the first day back. If damage occurred during the break, that documentation supports insurance claims and police reports. Take timestamps seriously, because your insurer will want to establish when the damage likely happened.
The holidays should be a break for your employees, not an open invitation for property crime. The work you do this week to secure your buildings will determine whether January starts with business as usual or a call to your insurance adjuster. It’s not glamorous work. Check the alarms. Fix the lights. Lock the doors. That’s the whole strategy, and it works.