Everything at a Vancouver home that takes a key: the front entry, the suite door, the garage, the mailbox. A licensed technician, a price on the call, and same day on most residential work.
Residential lock work in Vancouver splits along one line, and it is not the line people expect. On one side are the doors you own outright, where the only question is what to fit. On the other are the doors you live behind without owning: a suite in a strata tower, a rented ground floor, a unit in a block with a landlord somewhere and a street entry shared with everyone else in the building. Which side your door sits on decides who authorises the job, how long it takes to arrange, and occasionally whether it can be done at all.
This page is the scope, the prices and the routing. Each job below has its own page with the detail on it.
The bands below are what residential work in Vancouver typically runs. What moves a job inside a band is the hardware grade, how many cylinders are involved, and whether the visit is a booked window or an urgent call. They are ranges rather than fixed quotes: you get a figure on the call from what you describe, and it is confirmed against the hardware at the door before any work starts.
| Job | Typical range |
|---|---|
| House or suite lockout | $95 – $160 |
| Rekey an existing cylinder (each) | $45 – $75 |
| Rekey the whole house, three to five cylinders | $120 – $200 |
| Standard deadbolt replaced, hardware included | $130 – $220 |
| High-security deadbolt, supplied and fitted | $220 – $380 |
| Smart lock supplied and fitted | $180 – $350 |
| Deadbolt added to a door never bored for one | $160 – $260 |
The two rekey rows are the ones that matter most at a house. A single cylinder is priced on its own, so a front entry, a back door and a garage cylinder count as three; once three to five of them are done on the same visit, the whole-house band applies instead. Hardware you have bought yourself is fine to fit, and it is itemised apart from the labour on the receipt. The lockout row is for the lockout itself; the total for your address is confirmed on the call before a technician is sent.
Describe the door and you get the range on that call, which is also how the technician knows which cylinders to bring. Call 604-227-9083, or take a booked window online for anything that is not urgent.
The brand you guessed over the phone and the brand stamped on the faceplate are not always the same, so the quote is checked against the real hardware at the door. Nothing is cut until you have agreed the figure.
The closing test on residential work runs both ways. The new keys open what they should, and the keys that were in circulation before are put in the lock to prove they no longer turn.
Most people call asking for a locksmith and describe a symptom. This is roughly how the symptoms sort out.
| What you are dealing with | What to book |
|---|---|
| You are outside the home, at any hour | Emergency lockout |
| The key snapped, or the cylinder will not turn with the right key in it | Emergency lockout |
| The keys work, but you do not know who else holds one | Rekey |
| The key turns and the bolt will not reach its pocket | Door repair |
| The lock is gritty, loose, or no longer latches cleanly | Lock change |
| There is no deadbolt on the door at all | Deadbolt install |
| You want a code instead of a key | Smart lock install |
| You need more keys than you have | Key cutting |
| The property holds more than one household | Key plan |
Residential calls sort themselves by the decade a home went up more reliably than by which side of Main Street it sits on, and four layers account for almost all of the book. The pre-war wood-frame stock runs right across the city: the Craftsman and Tudor-Revival houses around Tolmie and Drummond in Point Grey, the heavy slabs of First Shaughnessy, the character houses off West 4th, and the same generation of house in Strathcona, around Clark and Venables, and on Napier, William and Charles behind Commercial Drive. Then the post-war layer, roughly the 1940s to the early 1960s: the bungalows and wartime houses on 33-foot lots along Parker, Graveley and Kitchener in Hastings-Sunrise, the craftsman and stucco character homes of Dunbar, the family houses on Laurel, Ash and Willow between 41st and 57th in Oakridge, and the three and four-storey walk-up blocks that went up through Strathcona and Cedar Cottage in the same years. Then the 1960s to 1980s: the boxy two-storey houses filling the grid off Victoria Drive, Nanaimo, Slocan and Renfrew-Collingwood, and the low-rise apartment buildings along West 41st in Kerrisdale, on Cambie and Oak through Oakridge, on Jervis, Gilford and Cardero in the West End, and back from Kits Beach along Cornwall. Last the towers and the infill, which arrived in the same stretch of years at opposite ends of the scale: the 1990s rebuild of Yaletown, the Cambie Corridor, Oakridge Park and the West 70th and 71st blocks in Marpole, against the laneway houses and infill duplexes added across the east side and along Boundary.
The layer settles two things before anyone has described a symptom. The first is whether the lock on the door came with the house or was added to it long afterwards, which is the difference between servicing a cylinder and replacing a lockset. The second is how many households sit behind one front path, and in every one of the four layers the answer is more often more than one. The pre-war houses off West 4th and behind Commercial Drive were divided into suites decades ago. The post-war bungalow took a suite underneath it. The 1960s two-storey was built with a ground floor that would become one. The newest layer is frequently a laneway house at the back of a lot that already had a suite in it. Mixed blocks are what catch people out, because a single street can run all four, and at the door they have almost nothing in common.
The other thing a residential call turns on is tenure, and tenure is the one thing about a building you cannot read from the sidewalk. The low-rise stock along Cornwall and the blocks running back from Kits Beach is part strata condo and part walk-up apartment with a landlord behind it, built in the same years to the same height, and from the street they are the same building. West 41st in Kerrisdale reads the same way, where a strata suite and a garden-level rental are both ordinary bookings and neither announces itself from the frontage. On a detached lot the question does not arise at all, since every lock on the property answers to the same owner. Which of the three you are standing in front of decides who is entitled to authorise a lock change, so it is worth settling on the call rather than at the door. What your own building then permits on your own suite door is a matter of its bylaws, and those differ building to building: the rekey page covers why re-pinning is the version of the job that is invisible from the corridor, and the smart lock page covers the keypad question.
A great deal of this city's housing is rented, and plenty of it is not in a strata at all. The post-war concrete apartments of the West End, the mid-century blocks along Kingsway, the three and four-storey walk-ups east toward Nanaimo: these have an owner or a property manager rather than a council, and that changes the shape of a residential call.
In a building like that the street entry is usually on one common key held by every tenant in the building, and it stays that way when somebody moves out. That door is the owner's to change and not yours, which is worth knowing before you spend an afternoon trying to arrange it. Your own suite cylinder is the one you can act on, and it is also the one that matters most, since it is the only door between the shared corridor and your things.
Where an owner is not willing to touch the existing hardware, the usual answer is a second deadbolt on the inside face of the suite door, agreed with them first, which leaves what they own exactly as it was. Older blocks are worth a sentence of description when you book, because the cylinder behind an original suite door is often nothing like the modern bored hardware people picture. Read out whatever is stamped on the faceplate and the right stock travels with the technician instead of being discovered at the door.
Lock work at a house is rarely a single door once a technician is standing there, and combining jobs saves a second trip. A rekey, an added deadbolt, a handful of spare keys and a garage cylinder are one visit. Door and frame work goes alongside a lock change on the same call, which is the sensible order when the frame is what moved. A house and a secondary suite get done together, though they should come away on separate keys.
Three things do not fold into a general residential visit, and it is better to know now than at the door. Safe work is a separate trade with a separate kit, so it gets booked as safe work rather than added to a lock job on the day. Garage springs, cables and panel sections are work we do, but they ride on a garage door repair booking rather than a lock call, because the winding bars, clamps and spring stock travel with that job. The lock, the opener and the remotes are the garage part that does come with a residential visit. And building fobs, enterphone handsets and parkade credentials are the building's own system in every case, whether that building is run by a strata council or a landlord.
Residential calls across Vancouver and the central Metro. Pick an area for the local detail.
Specialist residential work for houses, suites and strata units across Vancouver.
Every locksmith job covered: home, car and business.
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.