Most night calls here start the same way. A SkyTrain ride back to Metrotown or Brentwood, and the suite key is still on a desk somewhere else. You get the price on the phone, then a licensed technician comes out for the suite door, house or car. The arrival window comes with the price, based on where the nearest technician is, and Burnaby Mountain always runs longer.
Burnaby is a tower city with a house city wrapped around it, and the calls split along that line. The Kingsway, Willingdon and Lougheed corridors send suite lockouts, parkade car lockouts and after-hours strata access. Capitol Hill, Government Road and the South Slope send detached houses with five exterior doors, long driveways, and hardware already on its second or third rekey.
The most useful thing to know before calling from a tower at 2am is which emergency you actually have. Outside the lobby with a dead fob but your suite key in your pocket? Your building's emergency line will fix that faster than we can, because the reader and the gate are its contractor's to reset rather than ours to open. Standing at your own door with no key is the call we can finish tonight, and it is the one worth making at that hour.
Underground visitor parking is close to universal in the newer Brentwood buildings on Willingdon Avenue and Beta Avenue, and the towers around Metrotown station and Station Square work the same way. Give us the stall level and the technician arrives with tools in hand instead of circling. Say so too if the building runs controlled elevator access, because a contact has to send the car up, which adds time.
Property managers call after hours for something else. A lost fob, a tenant dispute or a management handover usually means a floor or a whole building rather than one suite, quoted per cylinder. Under about 30 units can be finished in one visit. After hours is the wrong moment to discover a master key system nobody on site has the chart for, because re-pinning a single suite blind can lock the manager’s key out of the whole floor. If the chart cannot be produced at 2am we secure the door and pin the system properly in daylight.
Metropolis at Metrotown generates more car lockouts than any other single address here, heaviest on evenings and weekends, and it is hard to describe over the phone. Give us the level plus the nearest sign, pillar marking or mall entrance. Highgate Village is the opposite, an open lot where a row and a plate is enough. The rest is civic: a house key shut in a locker at Eileen Dailly Leisure Pool and Ice Rink on Willingdon Avenue, a car key on the seat at Edmonds Community Centre, the Shadbolt Centre lot at Deer Lake Park, and the Gaglardi Way and SFU lots.
You get the price on the phone, before anyone is dispatched. What moves a job within its range is the lock type, the hour, and whether hardware has to be replaced rather than opened.
| Situation | Typical range |
|---|---|
| House or suite lockout, standard deadbolt | $95 – $160 |
| Lockout on high-security or smart lock hardware | $135 – $220 |
| Car lockout, most makes | $95 – $160 |
| Car lockout, push-start or complex entry | $130 – $200 |
| Forced door re-secured, lock replaced | $160 – $300 |
| All keys lost, cylinder rekeyed on site | $110 – $185 |
| Broken key removed from a cylinder | $90 – $150 |
| Commercial lockout, retail or office unit | $120 – $250 |
Calls outside business hours carry an after-hours rate, built into the number you are quoted. A house, suite or standard car lockout is $95–$160 for the lockout itself, with the total for your address confirmed on the call before a technician is sent.
Non-destructive entry is the default and nothing is drilled without telling you first, but a door that has already been forced is a different job. Those calls cluster in known places: storefronts on the Hastings Street strip in The Heights, retail units along Kingsway through Metrotown and Edmonds, warehouse doors in Big Bend off the Marine Drive curve, and light industrial units on the Brunette Avenue corridor at the Cariboo edge. Do not leave the door until morning, because a bent bolt or a strike plate torn loose is not a locked door. If the frame took the damage rather than the lock, a temporary padlock or surface bolt holds the opening until carpentry is scheduled. Pre-1950s houses in Burnaby Heights and the oldest Edmonds blocks near the New Westminster boundary often have door preps that predate standardised cylinder sizing, so a replacement does not always drop straight in.
One problem gets mistaken for a lock failure constantly. If the key turns normally but the bolt will not seat, the cylinder is fine and the latch or strike alignment is not. Frames move here: settlement in the post-war houses of The Heights, seasonal wood movement on Capitol Hill, soil settlement in older Edmonds homes, hillside shift on the South Slope, doors swelling in Burnaby Mountain's weather. That is door repair, not a new lock.
The van carries the two keyways that cover most of this city, Kwikset KW1 and Schlage SC1, plus a key cutting machine, so an all-keys-lost job usually ends with working keys the same visit. Build era predicts which you have. Buildings put up before roughly 2005 are disproportionately pinned to KW1, while Lougheed and Brentwood towers built after 2010 lean to SC1 or to a restricted keyway the developer specified. That last case matters at 2 a.m. We can open the door and get you inside, but a duplicate on a restricted system has to come through the strata or the original supplier, so the same-night result is entry plus a plan.
Older stock runs Kwikset or Weiser through Burnaby Heights, Edmonds and the lower slopes of Capitol Hill, with Weslock and Arrow cylinders around Deer Lake and Government Road. A key that turns only at one precise lift angle, or sits in a cylinder with visible play, means the cylinder is worn past reliable pinning, and fresh pins do not fix worn spring seating. That is a lock change, not another rekey. In Edmonds especially we keep finding deadbolts rekeyed with mismatched pins. Forgotten safe combinations cluster in the larger older homes around Buckingham Heights and Government Road, and start with non-destructive manipulation.
We give you the arrival window on the call, based on where the nearest technician actually is. Two areas take longer than the rest of the city, and we would rather say so up front than leave you waiting without knowing it.
Capitol Hill runs longer because the upper streets are narrow, steep and unfamiliar to anyone who does not live on them, so the technician navigates by street address rather than landmark. The mountain runs longer because Gaglardi Way is effectively the only way up. Elsewhere the delay is congestion rather than distance, and evenings and weekends are faster. One boundary matters: at Lougheed, North Road is the line and we work the Burnaby side of it. An address east of North Road is Coquitlam, and we confirm that on the phone.
No, and that is deliberate. Fob readers, parkade gates, intercom panels and building-wide access control are your strata's system and its contractor's responsibility. Our work is everything from the suite door inward.
The building address, your suite number, and the visitor parking level. Visitor stalls decide which elevator bank the technician uses, and in the newer Brentwood and Willingdon buildings that is the difference between arriving ready and circling underground.
The parkade level and the nearest sign, pillar marking or mall entrance, plus the make and plate. That parkade is the busiest single lockout address in Burnaby, so those details save the most time. An open lot like Highgate Village needs far less.
Yes, with identity verification: photo ID matching the suite address, a lease, or recent mail addressed to you. Opening a door you live behind and changing the lock on it are separate things, though. Under BC tenancy law a lock change generally needs landlord consent, with specific safety-related exceptions.
Longer than the rest of the city, and longer again on a weekday afternoon. We give you the window on the call. SFU has its own facilities team for university-owned buildings, so what we take on the mountain is privately owned UniverCity units and off-campus student housing.
Emergency calls taken across the city, Metrotown towers to the UniverCity plateau.
Planned work booked in advance, by the same technicians.