The service pages and the fourteen area pages on this site go through Richmond door by door. This one takes what is left over: which service a job belongs under, who is allowed to authorise it, what the figure covers, and how to tell a real quote from a number invented to win a phone call. Where an answer has a longer version somewhere on the site, there is a link to it. If your question is not here, ask it on the line: 604-332-2291.
Arrival windows and coverage, the jobs people book under the wrong name, who can authorise work on a suite door, what a car key figure depends on, and what the quote includes.
There is no single Richmond figure to give you, because Bridgeport at the top of the city and Ironwood at the south end of No. 5 Road are not the same drive. The window you are given depends on where you are and where the nearest technician is at that moment, which the emergency locksmith page explains in more detail. Say which area you are in when you call and you are quoted a window for your own address rather than an average.
No, and nothing outside Richmond is inside it either. The city boundary is where this site stops, which is worth knowing if your address sits close to a bridge and you have been passed between companies before. The fourteen areas at the foot of this page take in everything between those edges, each with a page describing what its doors are actually made of, and the set is listed on the service areas page.
Two of them get booked under the wrong name often enough to be worth setting out here. A bolt that runs its full travel while the door stands open and then refuses once it is closed wants door repair, and no amount of new hardware will cure it. And a lost building fob is a matter for your property manager, because a fob is issued and cancelled on the building's own system rather than cut from a blank.
Beyond those two, book the closest thing on the list and describe the symptom in your own words. Anything that turns out to belong to the garage doors page or to another trade entirely is said on the phone rather than after a van has arrived. Dispatch sorts it from there, and being wrong about the label costs nothing as long as the description is accurate.
There is nowhere to bring it. Everything here is mobile: the key machine travels in the van, so keys are cut where you are. Whatever the job is, it happens at the door, the driveway or the parkade bay the lock is already in.
Yes, and it is worth asking for rather than waiting to be offered. Turnover through the No. 3 Road tower belt means a property manager often has several suites wanting new keys inside the same week. Worked as one block, nobody is paying for a separate trip and a separate setup at every door, so the cost per suite lands lower than booking them one at a time would.
The manager sets the order that suits the building and the list of suites completed goes back in writing afterwards. Lobby cylinders, parkade doors, amenity rooms and mail rooms sit under a different authorisation entirely and are handled as commercial work, which the commercial locksmith page covers.
Not on your own say-so, because the hardware on the door belongs to the owner rather than to the tenancy. That covers adding a deadbolt to a suite that only has a knob lock, which is the usual version of this request out of the older rental blocks at the north end of Brighouse. Once the owner has agreed to it, the work itself is quick.
The same call arrives from the other direction too. Once a unit has been rented out or sold on, every key handed over in the years before is still out there somewhere, which is why owners book a rekey between tenancies rather than after something goes wrong. That is a scheduled job rather than an emergency, so it goes through the booking page with a date on it.
Two things, and where the car is parked in Richmond is not either of them. The first is which of four keys the vehicle takes: a basic cut key with no chip in it, a transponder key, a cut and programmed remote fob, or a proximity key for a push-to-start car. Those are four separate jobs and each carries a row of its own on the car key replacement page.
The second is whether one working key has survived. If it has, the job starts from something the car already recognises. If nothing has, the code for the key has to come out of the vehicle itself and the immobiliser then has to accept a set it has never seen, which is the longer and the dearer of the two. Year, make, model and VIN are what let dispatch pick your row before a van leaves, and the small number of configurations that cannot be finished at the kerb at all are identified on that same call.
A standard residential lockout in Richmond runs $95–$160 for the lockout itself, and the total for your address is confirmed on the call before a technician is sent. Which end of the band you meet follows the hardware on the door, the hour of the call and where in the city the door is. A suite deadbolt on a familiar profile is a shorter visit than a seized mortise case on a heritage door in Steveston village, and that gap is most of the spread. Calls outside business hours carry a premium, quoted on the call before anyone is dispatched. Should the lock prove to be a bigger job than the description suggested, you get the revised figure and agree to it before any more work happens.
Where in Richmond the address sits is dealt with in the quote, not discovered at the end. A call to Ironwood at the far south end of No. 5 Road is quoted the same way as a suite off No. 3 Road: the total for that address and the job described is confirmed on the call before anyone is dispatched. That is why the arrival times are published area by area and the figure itself is settled on the call.
The bait pattern is consistent enough to describe. Somebody quotes $15–$35 for a lockout while you are still on the phone, which is a figure designed to win the call rather than to cover the work. Then the technician arrives, the job is declared high security or more involved than it sounded, and what gets presented before anyone leaves is a bill of $300–$600.
The tell is what the quote did not ask you. Richmond doors run from the wood-frame bungalows built on Sea Island at the end of the 1940s to townhomes handed over after 2010, and the hardware in them is what sets the length of a visit, so a firm figure offered without one question about the brand on the lock, or about whether a mortise case is involved, is not a figure for your job. Ours comes with a licence number attached to it, BC Security Worker Licence #E106677, and you can ask for it before anyone is dispatched. If a quote from somewhere else does not sound like it matches the work, ring 604-332-2291 and have it checked against what the job actually is.
Each area has its own page, carrying the arrival window for it and the hardware behind its doors.