After-hours construction site security in Houston means a licensed officer posted on your site during nonworking hours, controlling the gate, patrolling the perimeter and the laydown yard, and logging every round. Reliable Guard and Patrol Service Inc. holds Texas DPS company license B07315701, and runs about 150 officers across Houston and the surrounding metro. Coverage runs 24/7, holidays included.
The Gate Is How They Get In, Not The Fence
The most common way onto a monitored jobsite in 2025 was a vehicle driving through an unlocked or unsecured gate.
Nobody cuts a chain link fence to carry out a skid steer. They drive in. The gate gets left open because the last concrete truck was late, or the sub loading out at 6:15 p.m. was the only one with the key and he was not thinking about it, or the chain got looped but never locked. The officer who arrives at last truck out and physically closes that site is doing more work than the officer who sits in a truck from midnight to dawn on a site that was already standing open at sundown.
The Last Truck Out Check
We run the same nine-point closeout on every construction post before the officer settles into patrol rotation. It is short on purpose. A checklist nobody finishes is worse than no checklist.
- Gate closed, chained and locked. Locked, with the lock pulled by hand to confirm it caught.
- Secondary and delivery gates walked. Most sites have more than one way in. The second one is the one that stays open.
- Conex and container seals checked. Puck locks on every box, seal numbers photographed if the client uses them.
- Keys out of every machine. Excavators, skid steers, scissor lifts, generators. Keys go to the trailer or to the super. Never the cup holder.
- Fuel and generator status logged. A generator that goes dry at 2 a.m. kills your lighting and your cameras at the same time.
- Perimeter lighting verified live. Lights get checked on foot, in the dark. A photometric plan will not tell you which pole is out.
- Materials staged out of drag range. Copper spool, wire reel and pipe bundles moved off the fence line and away from the gate.
- Last-out headcount. Who is still on site, what vehicle, and when they left. This is the entry that matters most on the insider side.
- Photo log timestamped and filed. Gate, containers, laydown, equipment row. Four photos, geotagged, attached to the shift report.
Putting An Armed Officer On Your Site Without A Commission Is Your Violation Too
Texas Occupations Code 1702.161(c): “A person may not hire or employ an individual as a security officer to carry a firearm in the course and scope of the individual’s duties unless the individual holds a security officer commission.”
Read who that binds. Not the officer. Not the guard company. The person doing the hiring.
Most buyers assume an unlicensed armed guard is the vendor’s problem. The statute puts the hiring restriction on the client as its own subsection. If a vendor posts an armed officer on your site without a commission, you are inside the same section of the Occupations Code they are.
Texas DPS has also closed the loophole people reach for next. Their published guidance for private security licensees states that the Private Security Act “limits the carrying of firearms to those security officers who hold a license as a commissioned security officer or as a personal protection officer,” that “non-commissioned security officers are prohibited from carrying a firearm while on duty,” and that the changes made by HB 1927 in 2021, the permitless carry bill, “do not override” those requirements. An officer who can lawfully carry on his own time still cannot carry on your gate.
So there is one question worth asking before an armed post starts, and it is not about the company. Ask for the assigned officer’s name and confirm the commission. We supply names on request, and our license number is B07315701.
What Sets Your Bill Rate
We quote per site, and the inputs are not a mystery.
Officer type moves it first. Armed costs more per hour than unarmed, and most commercial construction posts run unarmed with a written escalation plan. Armed earns its rate on a site carrying cash, on one where a prior violent incident is documented, or where the stored assets resell fast enough to attract a crew rather than an opportunist.
Shift and day move it next. Weekday overnight, weekend and holiday all price differently, overnight carries a differential, and holiday shutdown coverage is quoted as its own line. Hours per shift matter too. Short shifts cost more per hour than full ones, so ask any vendor for their minimum in hours before you compare two numbers side by side.
Then the post shape. A dedicated officer on your site prices differently from a rotation across several addresses. We quote a named post with a written scope, so a driver passing your gate twice a night is not something you can buy from us. A marked patrol vehicle, spotlight and GPS tour hardware sit in the rate. So do your site conditions: acreage, gate count, existing lighting, and whether there is a trailer with power and a bathroom for a twelve-hour post.
One thing the rate does not carry is a lock-in. Terms follow the job, down to a single week if that is what the schedule needs. Treat “you have to sign for a year” as a negotiating position rather than an industry standard, with us or with anyone else.
The wage a Houston officer earns is not your bill rate. The difference covers supervision, general liability, workers’ compensation, commercial auto, the vehicle and margin. A quote well under market means one of those is missing, and the one that goes missing first is insurance. Ask for the certificate before the officer stands the post and check that the coverage dates run past your completion date. The same goes for the paperwork the officer files nightly, which we cover in the site forms an officer fills out.
CALL US FOR SMART SECURITY SOLUTIONS
We Cover Houston, TX, Sugar Land, TX, Pearland, TX, Conroe, TX
What Is Actually Sitting Dark In Houston Right Now
The dark inventory in Houston is industrial. Downtown towers barely register.
Newmark’s Q2 2026 Houston industrial report puts 27.2 million square feet under construction, about 3.4% of total inventory, with 5,671,408 square feet delivered in the quarter alone. Houston’s office pipeline over the same period was 348,585 square feet across six properties, per Partners Real Estate, down 74.1% year over year.
Those two numbers should change how you scope a post. Warehouse and distribution shells have long fence lines, multiple gates, Conex rows and laydown yards spread across acreage. A single officer in a truck can see one side of that. A 20-acre shell with one choke-point gate often gets more from a locked gate, puck locks on every container, keys out of every machine and a monitored tower than from an officer walking a perimeter that takes the better part of an hour to lap.
We will tell you that on the call. It is a shorter contract for us and a better outcome for you.
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Free Armed & Unarmed Security Proposal
Why Houston businesses choose Reliable Guard & Patrol Service
Why Choose Our Armed Guards:
01. Fully Licensed to Carry in the State of Texas
02. Background-Checked and Drug Tested
03. Trained in Firearms Handling and De-Escalation
04. Experienced in High-Risk Property Protection
05. Serving Houston Businesses for Over 20 Years
06. Corporate, Construction, Retail, and Event Coverage
07. 24/7 Coverage Including Holidays
What Lands In Your Inbox At 6 a.m.
An overnight post produces one thing you can hold afterward: the file. Ours arrives before the first crew does.
Every round is scanned at fixed GPS checkpoints, so the record is a set of timestamps rather than an officer’s recollection. A round with no scans did not happen, and the gap shows on the supervisor’s screen the same night rather than in a monthly invoice review. Your account supervisor is one named person who holds the post orders for your site and knows your gate layout. We had a client last year who changed superintendents twice mid-build. The supervisor briefed both.
The morning packet is exceptions only, time-stamped, with photographs. Nobody reads “all quiet.” What you get is the closeout condition at the moment coverage started, anything that changed overnight, and the photographs to go with it. If something is missing at 6 a.m., the argument about whether it was there at 7 p.m. is already settled.
That record has a second use most GCs find later. A builder’s risk claim and a police report both ask what time the loss happened and what the site looked like beforehand. A GPS tour file answers both. Ask your broker what documentation they want within the first hours of a discovery, and ask any security vendor whether their tour data exports in a format the carrier will take. Both questions are cheaper before a loss than after one.
When An Overnight Officer Is The Wrong Buy
We turn work away. Here is where.
We do not provide fire watch. No add-on version, no combined security-and-fire-watch post. If your building requires one, use a provider who does that work and ask them for it directly. Residential, HOA and event work sits outside our scope, and there is no K-9, no alarm response and no parking enforcement here either. Commercial posts are all we staff. If your scope needs anything on that list, you will hear it on the first call rather than after you sign.
An officer also cannot replace a lock. If your gate stands open, your keys live in the ignition and your copper is stacked against the fence, an overnight post buys you a witness rather than prevention. Fix the closeout first. It costs nothing, and we will walk it with you whether or not you hire us.
One officer cannot see a 20-acre perimeter at once, either. On large horizontal sites a post plus hardened access beats a post alone, and on some of them a monitored camera tower is the better first dollar. We do not sell towers, so take that as read.
The reverse holds too. A camera cannot lock a gate, verify a delivery driver, challenge a man in a vest while the last sub is loading out, or turn a generator back on. Cameras and officers fail at different things. Anyone selling you one as a replacement for the other is selling.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is weekend coverage worth more than weeknight coverage?
On most sites, yes, and it is the shift GCs cut first. More than 40% of monitored jobsite break-ins land on a Saturday or Sunday, and an unstaffed weekend loss is usually not discovered until Monday morning. That is roughly two and a half days of head start before anyone files a report.
Do we need coverage from day one of the build?
No. You need it from the day the site holds something worth a truck. Site prep with rented iron and the keys pulled is usually a lock-and-GPS problem. The two triggers that move a Houston job to nightly coverage are the first large material drop and the wire landing in the Conex.
Someone in a vest shows up at the gate after the crew has gone. What does your officer do?
Checks the name against that day’s access list, and if it is not there, the person waits outside the fence until somebody on the project answers the phone. Utility, delivery and GC all get the same treatment. Houston’s copper cases over the last eighteen months have run on looking like you belong, not on cutting fence.
Can the same officer cover two adjacent sites?
Sometimes, and we will tell you when it is a bad idea. A single officer cannot watch two perimeters at once, and on large horizontal sites cannot really watch one. If both sites are inside a single fence line with one gate, a shared post can work. If they are separate addresses, you are buying half a post each and calling it two.
What do you need from us before the first shift?
A gate and access map, the name and number of whoever can be reached at 2 a.m., the current access list, and where the officer can park inside the fence. If there is a trailer with power and a bathroom, say so, because it changes a twelve-hour post.
Get An Officer On Your Site Tonight
Tell us the address, the gate count and the hours. We will quote the post and, in most cases, we can start today.