Fast Locksmith Vancouver is a mobile operation: licensed technicians, trucks already on the road, one dispatch line answered at any hour. This page covers how the company runs, what dispatch needs out of you on the phone, and the work we turn down. The short version is that you hear a price before a truck moves, and the truck comes to the door rather than the door coming to a counter.
No storefront to visit and no queue to join. The company is a phone number, a set of stocked trucks, and the people who drive them.
There is no counter to come to, and in Vancouver that is less a convenience decision than a description of the work. Most of the doors we get sent to cannot be brought anywhere. A suite door eleven floors up, behind a lobby somebody inside has to open. A basement entrance under a house that already carries three other doors on the same lot. The back of a shop, opening onto a lane rather than the arterial it is addressed on. A car on level three of a parkade, with a gate between it and daylight.
So the equipment travels instead. Cylinders get pinned on a tailgate, blades get cut at the kerb, and a door that will not latch gets shimmed and re-struck in its own frame, in the weather it has to live in. The trade-off is honest: a truck can sit in a bridge queue in a way a shop counter never does, which is why the call ends with an arrival window and not a promise.
The work divides roughly four ways, and the building stock explains the split. Strata residents, who own the lock on their own suite door and none of the hardware in front of it. Houses divided into two or three homes with two or three separate keys, which is the default east of Main Street and common enough in Kitsilano and Mount Pleasant as well. Pre-war houses on the west side still carrying the hardware they were built with, where the right answer is usually to service the lock rather than sell a new one. And drivers, a large share of whom are parked underground by the time the key goes missing.
A street number on its own frequently is not enough here, so the questions are specific. In a tower: the building, the suite, and who can let a technician in downstairs after hours, since that door is never ours to open. On a lot with more than one home on it: which entrance you are standing at, front stairs or side or lane. In a parkade: the level and the stall. Anywhere the front of a property is hard to read from the road at night: the nearest cross street. None of it is bureaucracy. Every one of those answers is something a technician would otherwise be working out from the kerb, in the dark, while you wait.
Some of what people expect from a locksmith is not a locksmith's to give, and it costs you less to hear it now than at the door.
The price is set on the phone, against the job as described and the hour it is happening, and you agree to it before a technician is dispatched. What arrival finds is occasionally not what the phone described. When that happens the work stops there, you get the revised number, and carrying on is your decision to make. Published ranges for individual jobs sit on the service and neighbourhood pages, and licensing questions are answered on the FAQs page.
Proof that the door or the vehicle is yours gets asked for on every lockout: ID, a lease or a word from the landlord where the ID does not match the address, a registration and the VIN on the dash for a car. It is asked at three in the afternoon and at three in the morning, and a technician who skips it is not one you want standing at your door.
Lockouts, break-in damage and all-keys-lost calls go to 604-227-9083, which is answered at any hour. Work that can be planned (a rekey timed to a possession date, a smart lock going onto a suite door, a master key system for a shop or a strata handover) can be booked online, and we confirm the slot within the hour during business hours. Overnight, the form waits for morning and the phone does not. Everything we carry is listed on the services page.
The same three steps for a 3 a.m. lockout downtown and for a rekey booked a week ahead of a possession date.
Anything urgent goes to the phone, which is answered at any hour. Anything that can wait goes through the booking form and comes back confirmed within the hour during business hours. Both routes ask the same three things: where you are, which door, and what the lock looks like. The price follows before dispatch.
For most of the city the window dispatch quotes is 20-30 minutes. New Westminster runs closer to 25-35, and the hill neighbourhoods at the Coquitlam end longer again. The Burrard Bridge approach at rush hour, the West 4th shopping strip at midday, or a July afternoon near the beaches all add to it, so dispatch gives you the window it actually expects rather than the one you want to hear.
The technician shows you what was done, walks you through any change against the quote, and settles up on the spot. Nothing gets invoiced later for you to chase. If the same lock needs another look next month, it is the same phone number and the same company, not a ticket queue.
An area page for each one, with the streets, the building types and the access quirks that actually come up there. The city itself, the peninsula out past Pacific Spirit Regional Park, and four municipalities beyond the boundary.
Pick-, drill- and bump-resistant cylinders with keys that can’t be copied at the hardware store. Cut, pinned and registered in-shop.
1/2" steel door, digital keypad, fitted and bolted on site.
Car keys are priced by vehicle. Pick what you need and we’ll collect your make, model & year to text you an exact quote.