Storefronts on Main and West 4th, office suites in the Broadway corridor, retail podiums under the downtown towers, light industrial units off Clark Drive. We rekey, master key, fit high-security cylinders and put a forced back door back into service. Price on the phone before the van leaves.
Most commercial calls in Vancouver open with a question about which doors you actually control. Commercial space here is stacked into strata buildings: the retail podium under a Yaletown tower, a second-floor suite on a West Broadway block, a light industrial unit strata-titled off Clark Drive. The cylinder on your own storefront or suite door can be changed this afternoon on your say-so. The lobby, the elevator, the parkade gate and the loading bay are common property, and that work gets ordered by the strata council or the property manager instead. Tell us which of the two you are calling about and we arrive with the right authorisation and the right hardware.
A licensed technician on every call. Nothing gets passed to a sub-contractor, and nothing gets cut before you have seen the price.
Typical bands for commercial work in the city. What moves a job inside its band is the door count, the hardware already fitted, and whether a cylinder can be re-pinned or has to come out.
| Service | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Emergency commercial lockout, any hour | $120 – $200 |
| Rekey an existing commercial cylinder (each) | $35 – $60 |
| High-security deadbolt, supplied and fitted | $180 – $350 |
| Restricted keyway changeover on existing doors | $200 – $500 |
| Panic bar or exit device, fitted | $300 – $600 |
| Keypad or fob entry, one door | $350 – $700 |
| Master key system, up to 10 doors | $400 – $900 |
Ranges, not a quote. You get the figure for your own site while you are on the call, and that is the figure on the invoice. Call 604-227-9083.
Four steps, and you see a real number at the second one.
Call 604-227-9083 with the address, the number of doors and whatever is on them now. Say whether the door is inside your own unit or on common property, because that changes who has to authorise the work. You get a range on that call.
A licensed technician walks the doors, notes the prep and backset on each one, and writes down who needs to open what. You get a firm number before anything is cut. If the shop is busy, we survey during a quiet hour and come back to install.
Cylinders, restricted blanks, strikes, closers and access components ride with the technician, so one to five doors usually finish in the same visit. Twenty-plus cylinders or a multi-door reader rollout gets ordered ahead, and you hear the lead time at the survey rather than on the day.
You get a key chart showing which key opens which door and how many of each were cut, plus a walkthrough of the admin screen on any keypad or card system. Adding a key later is a phone call, not another survey.
A large share of the city's commercial floor space sits inside a strata: office towers downtown, the retail bases of the Yaletown and Mount Pleasant condo blocks, mixed-use frontage along Main Street and West Broadway. In practice that puts two separate security systems in one building, and only one of them is ours. The keyed side is yours to authorise: the storefront or suite cylinder, the back-of-house doors inside your own space, the safe in the office. The electronic side, the part that gets you through the lobby and down into the parkade, is administered by the strata and stays with them. Knowing which side a door sits on before you call saves a wasted visit.
Two Vancouver wrinkles come up constantly. Heritage commercial conversions on Hastings, Cordova and Water Street were built with mortise pockets rather than a bored hole, so the upgrade that gets through strata and heritage review is usually a new cylinder or a repin inside the original housing, with the visible exterior hardware left exactly as it is. And where the door is common property, the go-ahead belongs to the council or the building manager, not to the tenant standing next to it. If you are the tenant and the door is shared, put us in touch with whoever runs the building and we will quote it to them.
Each strip locks up at a different hour, and that decides when the work can happen. Main Street between 2nd and 16th turns over operators constantly, and somebody taking the keys to a shop there usually wants every cylinder repinned before the first shift. West Broadway from Burrard to Cambie runs cafés, clinics and small retail on short tenancies, so a lock change between tenants is routine and cheapest while the unit is empty. Along East Hastings from Nanaimo to Renfrew, the auto shops and takeout counters put more traffic through the back door than the front. Restaurants on Water Street and the Granville Strip close late, and a rekey at one in the morning after the last set of staff keys comes back is a normal booking here.
Getting a van close to the door is part of the timing. Gastown's cobblestone blocks and the loading zones on Hamilton and Mainland in Yaletown cost a few minutes during business hours, and Georgia, Granville and Hastings clog through the middle of the day and again at evening rush. We plan the approach around it rather than quoting you a window that only holds at ten on a Sunday morning.
East of Main Street there is no single business district. The commerce sits on arterials: Kingsway running on the diagonal through Kensington-Cedar Cottage, then Fraser, Knight, Victoria Drive, Nanaimo and 41st, with the heavier stock in the industrial belt around East 1st Avenue, Clark Drive and the edge of the Grandview Cut. What that means for a locksmith is a run of single-tenant units where the entire security plan is a front door, a back door and whoever currently holds keys. No lobby, no concierge, no building manager to phone.
On nearly all of it, the back door is the one carrying the most keys. Over a few years it accumulates a delivery driver, two cleaners, whoever opens on Saturdays and at least one person who no longer works there, and none of that is written down anywhere. It is the first cylinder we repin after a staff change, and it is the strongest argument for a restricted key on a small site: when copies only come from the dealer holding your records, the list of people who can open the back of your building is a list you can actually produce. Have the closer set while the technician is there, because this is also the door that gets propped for a delivery and forgotten until close.
A pin pad on one door is the cheapest thing that works: one code, no keys to chase, change the code when somebody leaves. The step up is credentials. A card or fob is issued to a person, shows up in a log and stops working the moment you deactivate it. For multi-tenant office suites along the Broadway corridor, including the Broadway Tech Centre and the medical offices clustered around VGH, that is less a security purchase than an HR one, because nobody has to drive across town on a last day to collect a key.
We supply and program entry-level commercial hardware from Schlage, Yale commercial and Kisi-compatible readers, and we will work beside your IT people if the credentials live on a cloud platform you already run. One to five doors is a truck-stock job. A twenty-door floor needs hardware ordered, so call before you fix a cutover date. Where the reader sits, how it gets power and what the cable run looks like are decided at the door during the survey.
The window is given on the call, based on where the nearest technician is. The honest variable is traffic: Georgia, Granville and Hastings are slow through the middle of the day and through the evening rush, and a cobblestone block in Gastown adds a couple of minutes at the end. Staff shut out of an office, a keypad that has stopped responding, a cylinder seized after somebody worked on the door overnight: all of it is treated as an emergency call, 24/7, on 604-227-9083.
No. A fob or a card is not cut from a blank, it is enrolled in the building's system by whoever administers that system, so there is nothing for a locksmith to duplicate. Replacing a lost one is a request to your strata or property manager. What we can do on the same visit is everything on the keyed side: your suite or storefront cylinders, back-of-house doors, and any keypad or reader your own business owns.
Usually not. Where the hierarchy sits on an ordinary commercial keyway and the existing cylinders are still sound, new doors can be pinned into what you already have. Have the master and two or three change keys ready when the technician arrives, because reading them is the fastest way to identify what you have. If the blanks are restricted or stamped so they cannot be duplicated, only the dealer the system is registered to can cut more, and your property manager will know which one that is.
Securing the opening comes first, so you can trade. In most of these calls the cylinder still works and the jamb is what gave way, so the immediate job is getting the door closing and locking again, with boarding where a section of frame is gone. The rebuilt strike area and the reinforced anchors are then booked as their own visit, at an hour that does not cost you a day of trade. If a key went with the intruder, the rekey happens at the same time as the securing.
The entry to the space you lease is normally yours to rekey, and it is the most common commercial job we do. Shared doors are not, so those go through the building. Check your lease and the building's rules first, because a few landlords and strata councils require that the emergency master they hold keeps working. That is easy to accommodate if you tell us up front: the cylinder gets pinned so your new key and their master both operate it.
Yes, and for a shop it is often the sensible answer. A rekey between the last shift and the morning open is a routine booking. Planned installs and master key hand-overs are better in business hours simply because somebody has to sign for the keys and hear how the system works. Either way the number is agreed before anyone leaves for your address. Call 604-227-9083 and tell us when the room is free.
Commercial work across Vancouver and out into the central Metro: Burnaby, Richmond, New Westminster and Coquitlam. Mobile service, so the survey and the fitting both happen at your own doors.
The three commercial jobs big enough to need a page of their own.
One number covers the rest of it: homes, vehicles and emergency call-outs.
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.