Two Richmond homes a short drive apart can be nothing alike at the door. A townhome off Capstan Way built since 2010 runs standardised hardware, a Schlage B-series or SmartKey deadbolt at the entry and a multi-point slider onto the patio. A house on the Thompson grid has a front deadbolt, the door through from the garage, a back door and often an outbuilding behind it, on hardware that is part original and part replaced. What a visit costs follows that count, so it is worth establishing before a van moves.
Mostly scheduled rather than urgent: possession days, move-out dates, and the doors nobody thought to count.
What decides a Richmond residential job is the building rather than the address: the decade it went up, and how many openings on the property actually take a key. Those two vary far more across the city than a list of neighbourhood names suggests, which is why the questions on the phone are about your doors rather than your street. Where the area does count is the drive, and the window you are given depends on where the nearest technician is when you call. The map moves your arrival window rather than your quote.
In the No. 3 Road tower belt the answer is usually one. A suite is a single deadbolt, occasionally two once a storage locker is counted, and that is the whole job. Move to the newer townhome stock in West Cambie and a patio slider joins it. Neither of those is where callers get caught out.
The detached grids of west Richmond are. In Broadmoor one of the most frequent requests is not a lockout at all: one key cut to run the front door, the side door and the garage entry, three cylinders where the call started with one. Seafair sets that same job a different problem. A deadbolt replaced at some point since the house was built sits alongside secondary doors still carrying the knob sets they were built with. Where the two no longer share a keyway, the outlier is swapped for a matching cylinder rather than rekeyed, and only then does the property run on one key. Carry on to the southwest fringe along Steveston Highway and the count stops being about the house at all: the larger Gilmore lots sometimes carry a workshop, a storage shed or an equipment building as well, and on the older properties a detached garage can be held by a padlock and hasp rather than a keyed cylinder.
This is why a Richmond residential quote is built on the number of cylinders rather than the size or the value of the property, and why the walk round happens before any figure is given rather than after. It is also why the honest answer to what a rekey costs is a question about your doors.
The dense half of the city calls on turnover, and often the person on the phone is not the person who lives there. Suites along the Canada Line change hands steadily, so a good share of that work is booked by a property manager against a set of move-in dates rather than by a resident with a problem.
Thompson is the opposite case. The grid between Blundell Road and Williams Road holds next to no strata, so the caller usually owns the house, and the job is every exterior cylinder on the property at once rather than a single suite door. Ironwood sits between the two: its strata townhomes are often still running whatever the builder fitted, and it tends to take a resale or a new tenancy before anyone gets round to changing it.
Your figure lands where it does inside a band according to the grade of hardware you pick, how many cylinders the walk round turns up, and whether the slot was booked or needed straight away. Every line below is a band rather than a fixed figure, and yours is settled on the phone before a technician is sent.
| Job | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Home lockout | $95 – $160 |
| Rekey, a single cylinder | $45 – $75 |
| Rekey, a house of 3–5 cylinders | $120 – $200 |
| Standard deadbolt change, hardware supplied | $130 – $220 |
| High-security deadbolt (Schlage B, Medeco) | $220 – $380 |
| Smart lock supply and install | $180 – $350 |
| Deadbolt fitted where there is no existing prep | $160 – $260 |
Those figures already carry the labour. The home lockout row is for the lockout itself, with the total for your address confirmed on the call before a technician is sent. Hardware sits on top at its own cost by brand and grade, and what that comes to is said out loud before anything is bought rather than discovered on the invoice.
Before you ring, walk the property once and count what takes a key. Most people stop at the front door and turn out to be a cylinder or three short. That number is what the quote is built on, and getting it right on the call is what stops the figure moving later.
The brand stamped on the face of the lock, whether any of it has been changed since the place was built, and whether one of them sticks or drags. That decides what leaves on the van, which is how most Richmond jobs finish without a second appointment.
The moment the pins change, every key ever cut for that lock stops working, including the one you never got back. You leave with as many copies as you asked for, cut at the address rather than fetched from a counter.
Fourteen areas, each with its own page on the housing stock, the hardware and how long the drive takes.
The narrower home jobs, each on its own page. Any of them can be added to a rekey visit rather than booked separately.
Everything outside the house: vehicles in the parkades and driveways, and the commercial doors along No. 3 Road.