Keypad, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth deadbolts supplied and fitted across Richmond, from suite doors in the Brighouse and City Centre towers to detached entries in Broadmoor, Seafair and Thompson. The door gets measured before a model is settled on, and the override key is tried from outside before anyone packs up.
Two different jobs travel under the same name here. One is a keypad or Wi-Fi deadbolt going in where a mechanical one used to be. The other is a lock the builder already hung, working perfectly well, where what is missing is the owner account and a code list anyone can account for.
Richmond is largely post-1960 housing, and nearly all of it was built or re-doored to the bored deadbolt standard, so the usual answer here is that a smart deadbolt drops into the hole the old lock came out of. What decides your particular job is not the neighbourhood. It is three facts about the specific door: whether there is a bore through its face at all, whether the bolt seats now without anyone leaning on the door, and what the key already on your ring opens. All three are settled on the phone or with a tape measure at the door, before a model is chosen and before anything is ordered.
Tower suites are the quickest work of this kind in the city. The deadbolts in the Brighouse towers are almost universally Schlage B-series or Weiser, and the modern condo doors in City Centre carry a standard deadbolt prep that accepts a common smart lock model, so a battery keypad goes on one with no cutting, no filling and nothing touched that belongs to the building. Townhome and subdivision stock behaves the same way: the 2010s West Cambie rows that sit between Garden City Road and No. 3 Road, the wood-frame townhome rows north of Westminster Highway in Hamilton, the Ironwood subdivisions south of Steveston Highway, the Steveston rows off No. 1 Road and Railway Avenue. So does most of the detached stock, from the 1980s houses around Aintree Drive and Hopcott Road in Thompson to the 1990s and early-2000s Terra Nova homes set back from the dyke.
Three kinds of Richmond door will not take one, and they are worth naming because owners usually buy the lock before they find out. A pre-1960s house in Steveston village, and the occasional secondary entry on a Burkeville bungalow, carries a mortise body: the mechanism lives in a pocket cut into the edge of the slab, so there is no hole through the face for a smart deadbolt to occupy. The architecturally distinctive builds along the Terra Nova dyke edge, and the patio doors on newer West Cambie townhomes, lock on multi-point mechanisms driven by the handle, and nothing sold in a box replaces one of those. Out on the larger Gilmore properties the workshop, the shed and the farm gate are often closed by a padlock through a hasp rather than a keyed cylinder, and a hasp offers nothing to mount a deadbolt into. In all three cases the keypad, if you still want one, goes onto a different door on the same property, and the hardware in question is a door and hardware repair matter rather than a smart lock one.
West Cambie is largely post-2010 construction, and the units around Capstan Way, Hollybridge Way and Alexandra Way increasingly arrive with an electronic or keypad lock already hanging on the door, fitted to the developer's specification rather than chosen by whoever ends up living behind it. That owner does not need a new lock. What is worth checking after a handover is the same thing that makes a rekey worth doing on a mechanical one: whether the administrative account is in your name, and whether a code entered during construction, sales or the walkthrough is still sitting in the lock.
That visit is short and it is not a hardware purchase. Administrative access moves to you, every code held in the lock is cleared and then re-entered deliberately with a note of who has which one, the auto-lock behaviour is set rather than left as shipped, and the override cylinder is checked against whatever key the unit was handed over on. Where the unit has been rented or resold since the builder finished, that cylinder is worth re-pinning in the same visit, because a code list you control sitting above a cylinder you do not is half a job.
Ironwood is the same situation a decade earlier. A good number of the strata townhomes south of Steveston Highway are still running exactly the hardware the builder hung, so the day a smart lock goes onto one is usually the first day that door has a key history anybody can account for. On those, the front entry, the back door and any secondary entry belong in one visit rather than three.
Every smart deadbolt worth fitting still has a key cylinder in it, and out of the box that cylinder is cut to its own brand-new key. Nothing on the box says so, and on a property whose doors have already been brought onto a single key it is the detail that decides whether the installation is an improvement or a nuisance. The front entry is seldom the only keyed opening on a detached Richmond lot, and consolidating them is common enough work here that it is worth raising before the old lock comes off.
Fit a smart lock to the front door without accounting for that and the front door leaves the arrangement: one code, one unfamiliar key, and a house key that now opens everything except the door the household actually uses. The way round it is to change the override cylinder for one on the keyway the rest of the property runs, so the existing key still works the front door and the code becomes a second route in rather than a replacement. Whether your keyways can be brought together depends on what is already fitted, and the lock change and rekey page works through that. The part that belongs here is the buying advice: before you order, confirm the model lets its cylinder be swapped, because some are built around a core that cannot be.
The three types differ in what has to be working before the lock will do its job. A keypad deadbolt needs nothing but its own batteries. A code opens the door, the code is changed in seconds at the door itself, and an outage or a dead router changes none of that. A Wi-Fi lock adds the functions that only matter when you are elsewhere: letting a contractor or a cleaner in remotely, seeing that somebody came through and at what time, and issuing a code that stops working on a date you set. A Bluetooth lock unlocks as you walk up and keeps nothing on anyone else's server, but it wants a hub inside the home before it will do anything at a distance.
On most Richmond detached houses the plain keypad is the honest recommendation, because the remote functions solve a problem that household does not have. Where they earn their cost is turnover: a Brighouse suite or an Ironwood strata townhome that has changed hands more than once, where the value is being able to withdraw one person's code without disturbing anyone else's. Doors a business controls sit in a different category on different hardware, and those are priced on the commercial locksmith page instead.
These are the bands the work lands in rather than a quote. Three things move your figure: which lock, what condition the door is in, and how many keyed openings you want done. You hear all three read back to you before a van is dispatched.
| Job type | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Your own lock, fitted to the deadbolt prep already in the door | $80 – $130 |
| Keypad deadbolt, mid grade: lock and fitting | $220 – $320 |
| Wi-Fi smart lock: lock and fitting | $300 – $450 |
| Premium HomeKit or Matter smart deadbolt: lock and fitting | $400 – $600 |
| Door prep, where the bore or the strike needs work first | $60 – $120 add-on |
| More than one door on the same Richmond visit | Ask for a bundle price |
What pushes a job above a band is knowable in advance. A door that has dropped or swollen far enough that the bolt no longer seats gets put right first, because a smart lock drives that bolt on a timer whether the door is sitting square or not, and it will keep driving it several times a day. A mortise door is not a swap at all. And on a detached property the sensible unit of work is the house rather than the door, which is what the last row of the table is for.
Everything below sits inside the figure you were quoted, and everything below happens on every visit. The items owners are tempted to skip are the ones that decide whether the lock still behaves two winters from now.
Which door, and what is on it now. A suite door in a Brighouse or City Centre tower, a West Cambie or Hamilton townhome, a Broadmoor or Seafair entry, a house in Steveston village. If you have already bought a lock, read us the model. If you are in a strata, say what your council has told you about exterior hardware. That is enough to fix a range before a van moves.
Bore, setback and thickness get measured, then the existing lock is worked and the bolt watched into the strike. In the tower stock this takes a minute, because the prep is standard and the slab is solid. On an older Steveston or Burkeville door it is the entire question, and the answer arrives with a price attached before the old lock is unscrewed.
Owner credential, the code list, auto-lock timing, and pairing where the lock is networked. Then the override key is tried from the street side with the door closed, two keys are handed over, and you work the door yourself from the keypad and from the app before anyone packs up.
Mobile service at any address inside Richmond's city limits, same day where the slot allows.
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