Fast Locksmith Burnaby is one licensed mobile crew working a single city, and has been for years. A person answers, you get a price and a real arrival window, and a van leaves. Working one city for that long is mostly knowledge of where the slow parts of it are, which is why the window you are quoted for a Capitol Hill address is not the window you are quoted for a Kingsway one.
One phone line, licensed technicians, and a van stocked for the doors this city actually has.
In a city this vertical the civic address is often not the destination. A Metrotown call is really a call to a visitor stall on one level of one tower. A call from Metropolis at Metrotown is a call to a car parked somewhere inside the parkade of the largest mall in the province. So the questions come before the truck: which building, which suite, which parkade level, what signage is nearest the vehicle. Answering those on the phone is the difference between a technician arriving, and a technician arriving and then walking a concrete deck for fifteen minutes looking for your bumper.
Towers with controlled elevators need one thing more, which is somebody inside who can get us to the floor. If you live there, that is you. If you are a property manager calling about a suite you cannot enter yourself, say so on the call and we will build the window around a building contact being present, instead of parking a truck in a loading zone and hoping.
Burnaby is small on a map and slow in places, so no single figure is honest for the whole city. Each area page here carries the window for that part of Burnaby, and the one you are given on the phone is built from your address and the hour you called rather than from an average. The rule behind it is dull and absolute: where two numbers are both defensible, you get the longer one. Nobody has ever complained about a truck that turned up early.
The mountain is the case that keeps that rule honest. One road climbs it, so a job at UniverCity is a different proposition from a job on the flat ground at the bottom of the same hill, and pretending otherwise only leaves somebody standing outside longer than they were told they would be. The climb carries no area surcharge, and neither does the run out to Government Road. A long drive is our cost of covering one city properly, not a line item on your bill.
Two of Burnaby's borders do not look like borders. North Road is the Coquitlam line with towers facing each other across it, and out at Cariboo the boundary is the Brunette. People call their address Lougheed or Cariboo in complete good faith while standing in Coquitlam, because nothing on the street tells them otherwise. So a handful of calls a week end with us naming the boundary and handing the caller back their evening to ring somebody else. That is the job working correctly, not a sale lost.
The upside of a one-city territory is that nothing inside it counts as an outlying run. Buckingham Heights, the SFU plateau and the far end of Cariboo are all simply Burnaby, and they are priced like Kingsway.
A large share of Burnaby's homes sit above a lobby, which means a fair number of the problems people describe as lock trouble are not locksmith work at all. Anything running on low voltage belongs to the access-control contractor the strata council put under contract, and that contractor is the building's choice, not ours. We can usually tell which kind of call it is inside a question or two, and when it is theirs we say so on the phone and point you back to your council or property manager. That is a saved visit rather than a lost one: a truck we sent could not have fixed it anyway.
The BC Security Worker Licence number is E106677, and it belongs to the crew that turns up at the door. What that is worth in practice is a business that can afford to say no. A sound cylinder gets rekeyed and you get told that new hardware would be money spent on nothing. A door that will not honestly take a modern deadbolt, which is a real conversation on pre-war preps in the Heights and on the oldest blocks down near Stride Avenue, gets the conversion quoted or gets declined, because a forced install is a lock that drifts out of alignment by the following winter and a customer who was right to be annoyed. Neither answer sells anybody very much. Both are why the same number keeps getting called back.
A lockout is a phone call, always: 778-655-2015, answered by a person rather than a menu, at any hour. Planned work goes through the booking form and we confirm a slot back to you: a rekey dated to a possession day, a keypad deadbolt going on once the strata council has signed off, a master key walkthrough for a Hastings Street storefront that has to happen after closing. Overnight, the form waits until morning. The phone does not.
The same three stages for a car locked in the Metropolis parkade at midnight and for a booked rekey on a Buckingham Heights house at ten on a Tuesday.
You get a price and an arrival window on the call, set by the job and the hour, before anyone gets into a truck. This is also where the awkward details surface: a suite that needs a building contact for elevator access, a car somewhere in a parkade with no level number yet, a safe whose make nobody has looked at in twenty years. Better here than in a lobby.
Vehicles are marked and technicians carry photo ID, which we would rather you actually looked at. We ask you to confirm the address is yours before anything gets opened, and on a rental lockout where the landlord cannot be reached we ask for ID matching the unit. That step protects whoever lives there next as much as it protects you today.
Payment happens on site, card or cash. Any change to the figure was raised and agreed while the door was still open, never added quietly at the end. Most residential rekeys and lock changes finish the same day, and usually inside an hour on the door.
Fourteen area pages: the streets, the hardware you are likely to be standing in front of, and the honest drive time to that corner of the city.