Ten locksmith services run off one Vancouver number, and a call here rarely stops at one of them. Getting you back inside is the first job. The key that is still out there somewhere is the second. What follows is what each service covers in Vancouver, where it stops, and which one tends to arrive alongside it.
Which of the ten you want, how fast it moves, and the one that usually comes with it.
Lock work in Vancouver pairs up. A renter is let back into a walk-up off West 4th, and the next question is how many keys to that suite are still in circulation from the tenancies before theirs. A deadbolt goes onto a house east of Main and misses the strike exactly the way the old one did, because what moved was the frame rather than the lock. A car gets opened three levels down in a parkade and the key that opened it is still lost. Ten services are listed here because the work really does divide ten ways. Plenty of Vancouver addresses use two of them on the same visit.
It also helps to know which half of the list you are ringing about. A lockout, a snapped blade, a forced door and a car that will not start are dispatched. Nothing has to be arranged in advance. The nearest truck simply turns toward you, and across most of the city that is a twenty to thirty minute drive. A master key hierarchy, a safe installation, a smart lock on a strata suite door and a batch of suite cylinders rekeyed at a building handover are booked instead. Those want a door count, a keying plan or an answer from your strata council before anyone starts, and the visit runs shorter for having had it.
One more thing worth saying on a page like this. The names below are the ones people type into a search box, and they are not always the ones that fit the job. "Change my locks" is usually a rekey, where the hardware stays on the door and only the pins inside it get swapped. A key that has gone stiff after a wet week is more often the frame than the cylinder. "Car key replacement", when the doors open and the engine turns over without catching, is an ignition rather than a key. Describe what the door or the car is actually doing instead of naming a service, and the right one of the ten gets chosen on the phone, before a truck moves and before you are quoted.
Ten links, ten different jobs. Each opens what that work involves in Vancouver and what it needs from you before it starts.
The overnight line, for the hours when nothing else in the city is open. Say first whether the door was forced or simply shut behind you, because that decides between a quick entry and a frame that has to be made lockable before morning. A shop on the Drive broken into overnight is the second kind, and on those the jamb has almost always taken more than the cylinder did.
Houses, strata suites, and the basement units rented out of them. A change of hands is what this line mostly rings about. A Vancouver Special off Victoria Drive or Nanaimo carries three or four separately keyed doors on the one address: the main entry at the top of the front stairs, a ground-floor suite, sometimes a second suite, and a garage off the lane. One of those turning over is a rekey of that door, not of the house.
Shopfronts, office suites, retail podiums and light industrial units. The call usually follows a departure rather than a break-in: somebody has left the business and a working key went out of the door with them. East of Main the door worth spending on is the lane one, behind the Kingsway and Victoria Drive frontages, which takes the deliveries and the late closes on the oldest hardware the property owns.
Worked at the car rather than at a workshop: barrels that will not turn, blades snapped off inside one, fobs gone flat. Gated parkades are the one catch, since we cannot badge ourselves in. Downtown it comes up more than people expect: the underground levels off Granville and Richards need you at the door yourself, or a concierge who has been told we are coming. Mention it on the call and the meet gets arranged before the truck sets off.
Nearly everything built since 2000 carries a transponder, which is why a blade copied at a hardware counter will open the door and leave the engine dead. The chip gets coded to your car at the kerb and tested in the ignition before we go. The short-term parkade at YVR is a standing version of this call, and it goes faster if you have the level and the stall number ready when you ring.
A rekey swaps the pins and leaves the door looking untouched, which is generally what a strata asking for consistent hardware and a heritage-designated exterior both want. A full change is for hardware that is worn, drilled, or a grade below what the door needs. One common reason a job moves from the first to the second is a cylinder in one of the 1960s walk-ups off Cornwall Avenue, repinned so many times over the years that it no longer latches cleanly.
What decides whether one of these lasts is the door under it. A keypad mounted on a slab that already needs a shove to shut will chew batteries and then fail on a schedule, so the door gets put right first and the lock goes on second. The strata is the other gate. Plenty of buildings around Oakridge, and some of the Yaletown stratas, will allow a keypad on the suite door only while a keyed cylinder on the building's own standard stays with it, which rules out the code-only models before you buy one.
A bolt that misses is nearly always a frame that moved, and the lock is innocent. The heavy pre-war slabs in Shaughnessy sag on their hinges until the latch stops reaching the strike; the post-war frames on the streets around Hastings Park swell instead, every wet season, and throw the bolt out of line the same way. It is worth knowing before you buy hardware, because a new deadbolt hung on a door that has dropped will miss in exactly the same place the old one did.
A fair share of these came with the property rather than being bought: set into a basement slab, or sitting behind a panel, with a combination nobody wrote down and no paperwork anyone kept. In the big old houses between 16th and 41st in Shaughnessy that is an ordinary find on a possession-day visit. Expect to show that the address is yours before it is opened.
For the point where keying everything alike stops being the right tool: an owner, a tenant, a cleaner and a trades person each need a door and not each other's. A strata building runs it the other way up: each suite keeps a key that opens only that door, and how far a building-held master is allowed to reach above it is set by the bylaws rather than by the locksmith. Tiered keys on a restricted profile, planned out before anything is cut.
Every link opens that area's own page: the building stock it runs, the access the work tends to involve, and the arrival window we actually hit there.
Pick-, drill- and bump-resistant cylinders with keys that can’t be copied at the hardware store. Cut, pinned and registered in-shop.
Residential Security Container (RSC) burglary classification: a key-locked security container designed to provide entry…
Car keys are priced by vehicle. Pick what you need and we’ll collect your make, model & year to text you an exact quote.