Richmond hands a key plan two very different jobs. In the Canada Line towers the suite deadbolt is the piece of a resident's ring that a plan can actually take in. Out west and down south, one owner can be carrying keys to four separate buildings. Either way the plan starts with what is already in the doors, not with a drawing.
Who opens what, settled on paper, then pinned into the cylinders that can carry it.
A master key system puts a group of cylinders on one pinning plan, so each holder carries a key cut to their own level while one key above them reaches everything underneath. In Richmond the opening question is rarely how many levels a plan needs. It is how far the plan is allowed to reach, because a tower resident's building credential is administered by the property manager, and the cylinder in a townhome complex gate belongs to the strata rather than to the household behind it. The keyed hardware is the half we pin, and the chart says so in writing.
Fourteen areas make up the coverage here and they ask for different things. Brighouse and City Centre are suite cylinders in high-turnover rental towers, where the caller is usually an owner or a resident manager rather than a business. Steveston and Hamilton are townhome complexes where the shared entry is closed by a key. Broadmoor, Seafair and Thompson are detached houses built between the 1960s and the 1990s, where the front deadbolt has been changed once or twice and the original knob set is still sitting on the side or garage door. Gilmore is a house with a workshop and an equipment shed at the far end of a yard. East Cambie is a warehouse on Viking Way where the whole question arrives with a staff change. The design stage looks similar in all five. The audit in front of it does not.
Cost follows the cylinder count and the number of levels above it, which is why the doors get counted before anything is quoted. The bands below are where Richmond projects usually land. Yours is the figure that comes out of the site visit.
| Project type | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Small office or retail (3–8 doors) | $400 – $850 |
| Medium commercial or strata (9–20 doors) | $900 – $2,200 |
| Large building or campus (20+ doors) | $2,500 – $6,000+ |
| Restricted key blanks (per key, ongoing) | $18 – $45 / key |
| Cylinder re-pinning for existing hardware | $55 – $120 / cylinder |
Parts and labour on standard door prep sit inside those bands. Two things decide where a Richmond property lands inside its own band. The first is how many of its cylinders survive the audit, because each one ruled out becomes a purchase instead of a re-pin. The second is the profile you settle on, since a restricted keyway is priced for the control it hands you over future copies rather than for the brass it is cut from. Both figures reach you before the visit goes in the diary, and no work starts until you have agreed to the total.
We walk the property with you and count every keyed opening, taking a cylinder off where the keyway cannot be read from the key alone. The number given on the phone and the number on the clipboard at the end of that walk are rarely the same one, and a plan drawn against the wrong one costs a second visit to put right.
The chart comes before the hardware. Every door gets a holder, every holder gets a level, and the version you approve is the version that gets pinned. Ten minutes more at this stage is the cheapest part of the whole job.
Cylinders are pinned or swapped, each key is handed over against a signature, and the chart and bitting record stay with whoever will run the system: an owner, a resident manager, a strata council. A chart that lives in a technician's notebook is no chart at all.
Tower enquiries here are hardly ever for a whole building. Usually it is an owner holding several suites in one rental tower whose keyring has grown with every purchase, or a resident manager who wants one level reaching the doors the strata itself owns. Those are two separate plans signed by two different people, and one building can carry both without either reaching into the other.
Suite deadbolts in the Brighouse towers are close to uniform, mostly Schlage B-series or Weiser, so an owner's plan across several units is a short conversation once the doors are counted. What catches people out is a prerequisite rather than the pinning: a level has to sit in a deadbolt. Where a rental suite carries only a knob lock, fitting a deadbolt to it is the landlord's decision and not the tenant's, so that approval comes before the chart rather than after it. In the older City Centre towers there is a second check, because a suite cylinder up there may have been rekeyed more times than anyone still has a record of, and a cylinder in that state gets replaced before it joins a plan rather than after keys have been cut to it.
A townhome complex in those two areas often has its shared entry closed by a key rather than by a reader, which puts a cylinder at the gate that a plan could in principle take in. Whether it does is two questions, not one. The gate is the strata's, so that half goes to the council. Your own front door is not, so that half can be pinned the week you ask for it. The two sides of one complex move at completely different speeds, and it saves a lot of chasing to know which side you are actually waiting on.
Mechanically it comes down to the keyway family. Where the gate cylinder and the suite deadbolt already belong to the same family, the pair can be rekeyed to run on a single key. Where they do not, one of the two has to be replaced to get there, and we price that before anything comes off a door. Steveston is the one to read first, because the complexes off No. 1 Road and Railway Avenue run a mix of Schlage B-series and Weiser SmartKey, and a SmartKey deadbolt is reset with a tool rather than pinned into a plan. Hamilton is the plainer case, where a complex is usually still carrying the Schlage and Weiser deadbolts it was built with, so the work is establishing which of the two a given row is on before the plan is drawn rather than unpicking decades of replacements.
On the detached west side and out at Gilmore, a plan has nothing to do with levels of staff. It is about how many separate buildings one household is carrying keys for. A Gilmore property at the farm edge, where the lots give way to the Agricultural Land Reserve, is often a house plus a workshop, a shed, an equipment building and a detached garage that has sat on a padlock hasp for years. Those properties get walked and inventoried on arrival, because a count given over the phone is always shorter than the count taken in the yard.
The split that earns its keep out there is the house on one level and everything beyond the back door on another, so a key can go to somebody who needs the workshop without that key also opening the house. The obstacle is sequencing rather than design. Hardware bought decades apart will not share a key, so the outliers are replaced first and the pinning follows, and both belong in one visit rather than two.
West Cambie went up almost entirely after 2010, and the Ironwood subdivisions run a generation newer than mid-Richmond as well, so hardware inside a single complex is consistent in a way older stock never is. That makes the design end easy and leaves one question about the cylinders. A SmartKey cylinder is reset with a tool rather than re-pinned, and one that has been through several of those resets often stops resetting cleanly, so a door like that joins a plan as a swap rather than a re-pin. A standard high-security Schlage cylinder takes the same door prep and matches the hardware already hanging on the door.
Ironwood's strata townhomes are the other recurring case, and a good number are still running the hardware they shipped with. That matters most where a unit has been rented out or resold since, because nobody can say what became of the keys cut in between. A complex in that position is not really buying a hierarchy at the outset. It is buying a key count it can stand behind, and the levels are what keep the count from drifting again.
One rule covers both areas. Anything that changes the exterior hardware on a strata door goes to the council before it is booked. Battery keypad deadbolts that need no structural change are typically acceptable in the City Centre towers and many West Cambie stratas, but that is worth confirming rather than assuming. Where a strata will not have the exterior lock changed at all, two routes stay open: a higher-security pin stack inside the cylinder already in the door, or a grade 1 deadbolt that matches the existing door prep and looks identical to the one it replaced.
Fourteen areas, one number. Each area page carries the local hardware detail.
Residential, automotive and emergency jobs, booked on the same number.