Most Burnaby calls open with one of the questions below. They come from suite owners at Metrotown and Brentwood, from building managers running a floor of rekeys, from Heights homeowners whose pre-war door prep will not take a modern deadbolt, and from drivers standing beside a locked car somewhere on level three of a mall parkade. These are the answers we give on the phone. If yours is not here, call 778-655-2015 and ask.
Written for suite owners, detached homeowners, tenants, landlords, building managers and drivers, from the Hastings Street grid down to the Big Bend flats.
It depends which part of the city you are in and where the nearest technician is when you call, so we give you the real window on the phone rather than an average. Capitol Hill and South Slope run longer, because the upper streets on the hill are narrow and the slope routes feed back through Kingsway. Government Road slows during the SFU peak, roughly 8 to 9 in the morning and again from 4 to 6. Burnaby Mountain runs longest, and a call placed on a weekday afternoon sits at the far end of that. If the honest answer is a longer wait, you will be told so.
A person picks up, not a menu. A steady share of the overnight work is transit-shaped: the last train drops someone at Metrotown station and the house key is still sitting on a desk downtown. Coverage runs all night, every night, and the quote happens on that call rather than at the door.
Two things: the parkade level, and whatever signage is nearest the vehicle, whether that is a bay marking, a colour, or the mall entrance you came in through. Metropolis at Metrotown is the largest mall in the province and its parkade is genuinely hard to describe over the phone, so those details shorten the job more than anything else you can tell us. The same two questions apply at Lougheed Town Centre, where a mall parkade is stacked against a transit hub in much the same way. Civic parking produces its own steady share of this work and is far easier to describe: the Shadbolt Centre lot at Deer Lake Park, the parking around Edmonds Community Centre at 7282 Kingsway, and the Eileen Dailly pool and rink at 240 Willingdon Avenue, where the two recurring versions are a house key shut inside a locker and a car key left on the front seat.
Technicians arrive in marked vehicles, carry photo identification, and will ask you to confirm the address before anything is opened. If you are renting and the landlord is not answering, the identification you show needs to tie you to that unit. The licensed technician who takes your call is the one who does the work, so nobody unfamiliar turns up in their place.
No, and knowing that before you spend the call will save you a morning. A fob, the lobby reader it talks to, the gate arm on the parkade ramp and the intercom panel are all low-voltage access control, and your strata or property manager already holds a contract with somebody for exactly that. Your council or building manager is the right first phone call there, not a locksmith.
The rule of thumb that sorts it quickly: if the thing that stopped working takes a key, it is ours, and if it takes a fob or a code issued by the building, it is theirs. That is why the first question on a tower call is which one you are holding.
Strata rekeys here are rarely a single suite. A typical Brentwood property-manager call covers a floor or a building after a previous-tenant dispute or a lost-fob situation, and it is quoted per cylinder rather than per suite, so the door count is the first thing dispatch asks for. Where a given tower lands comes down to keyway and access, since a ground-floor unit is quicker than one that needs elevator access with a building contact standing by. The per-cylinder rates, including the lower rate when several cylinders are keyed alike on one visit, are published on the lock change and rekey page. Under roughly 30 units, the hardware can be identified, quoted and rekeyed in a single visit. Above that, we book a date with the building manager so floor access is arranged in advance.
Usually two or three, not one. Count openings rather than rooms: the door you come in by, a patio or back door behind it, and across most of the strata townhome clusters at the Lougheed end a garage side door carrying a cylinder of its own that nobody remembers until a key fails to fit it. That number, not the floor area, is what the quote is built from, so walking the unit before you call is worth five minutes.
A standard residential lockout runs $95–$160 for the lockout itself, and where it lands inside that comes down to the lock on the door, the hour you are calling, and which part of the city the van is driving to. The total for your address is confirmed on the call before a technician is sent. Nights, weekends and holidays carry the after-hours rate, quoted on the call before dispatch rather than added at the end. A car lockout in a Metrotown or Lougheed parkade is quoted the same way, with high-security hardware and push-start vehicles sitting above the residential band.
Whatever number you are given on the phone for the job as you described it is the number that reaches the invoice. If the door turns out to be something other than what was described, a seized cylinder that has to be drilled or a vehicle that needs a second bypass, the work stops and you hear the revised figure before it carries on.
It is priced per cylinder rather than per home, so the quote is built from how many keyed doors you have rather than the square footage behind them. One deadbolt is one deadbolt whether the door is in a Metrotown tower, a Capitol Hill bungalow or an Edmonds rental, and a detached front entry with a second keyed door behind it is simply two of them. Brentwood high-rise work is billed per cylinder rather than per suite, with keyway and access deciding where in the band a given door lands. A two-level master, where each suite key opens its own door and the manager's key opens all of them, costs more per cylinder than a plain rekey, because every cylinder has to be pinned twice.
Every one of those lines, along with supplying and fitting a replacement deadbolt when a cylinder is past re-pinning, is priced job by job on the lock change and rekey page.
The after-hours service call rate is not the same as the business-hours rate, and you hear the number for your specific job before the truck moves rather than reading it on the invoice afterwards. Distance is not what moves it. Buckingham Heights, Government Road and the climb up Burnaby Mountain are quoted off the same bands as a Kingsway address, and the hill shows up in the arrival window instead.
Two charges can look like travel on a bill, and both are worth knowing about before you book. One is the service call listed on the lock change and rekey page, which is credited against the work rather than added on top of it. The other only appears when nothing gets done: under the terms, a dispatch fee may be applied where a technician has already been sent and the job is then cancelled, or where nobody is at the address when the van arrives. Ring back with reasonable notice and that one does not apply.
A suite rekey is under an hour. Most whole-home rekeys are also under an hour, even on a Buckingham Heights or Government Road property with four or five exterior entries between the front door, the rear or side door, the garage man-door and sometimes a secondary suite. A post-contractor rekey on a standard house entry setup is usually finished inside 30 minutes. The van carries SC1 and KW1 blanks, common Schlage and Kwikset replacement cylinders, and a key-cutting machine, and if something is missing on our end the return trip is not charged to you.
No. The hardware gets looked at before anything is billed, and if the cylinder has to go you are quoted the replacement instead of the rekey rather than on top of it. The van carries common Schlage and Kwikset replacement cylinders in brushed nickel and oil-rubbed bronze, so that verdict does not usually cost you a second appointment, and an unusual finish can be ordered ahead if you mention it when booking.
It runs the other way at least as often. Plenty of visits to Buckingham Heights and Government Road turn up 1970s and 80s Weslock, Arrow or Kwikset cylinders with sound bodies that re-pin perfectly well, and those get re-pinned and nothing else. Long-term owner-occupied houses are full of hardware that is old without being worn out.
Most will. Residential doors across Burnaby are cut to a standard 2-1/8 inch bore and ANSI prep, which Grade 1 Schlage B-series and Medeco deadbolts drop into without modification. The exceptions cluster in two places. Pre-1950s houses in The Heights still carry mortise-style lock bodies and passage knob sets that predate standardised cylinder prep. So does the oldest stock at the far south end of Edmonds, near the New Westminster line, which produces more mortise bodies and old lever hardware than anywhere else in the city. Capitol Hill throws up the occasional pre-war prep with a non-standard backset as well, usually on a lower-slope house that has never been renovated. Some of those preps take a conversion kit. Some do not, and when a prep is genuinely non-standard the answer is no rather than a forced fit, because forcing a lock into the wrong door is both a reliability problem and a security one.
Usually, when it is a battery-powered deadbolt that reuses the door's existing prep, adds no wiring, and alters neither the door nor the frame. That is the version that tends to clear bylaws. Confirm it with your council before you buy hardware, and the sequence that works is to have us walk you through the install first, so you arrive at council with something concrete: which model, what comes off, what gets touched. The three actually fitted here are the Schlage Encode, the Yale Assure and the August Pro.
It splits two ways, and the smart lock installation page prices both: supplying and fitting the lock, or fitting one you have already bought, with a separate line for door prep where the bore or the strike plate needs work. Which tier you land in is decided by the model rather than by the door. New infill houses and laneway units in Willingdon Heights are the easiest candidates in the city, since current Schlage B-series and Kwikset SmartKey hardware swaps straight across. And if your existing deadbolt is sound and a rekey covers what you actually wanted, that is what you will be told before anything is ordered.
Yes. The van carries a key-cutting machine along with transponder cutting and programming equipment, so the key is cut and coded at the vehicle: a Metrotown visitor stall, a Government Road driveway, the shoulder of Canada Way. Call with the year, make, model and VIN and you get the number before anyone is dispatched. A minority of late-model platforms have programming locked to dealer equipment, and if yours is one of them you will hear it on the phone rather than after the truck arrives. More detail sits on the car key replacement page.
Because a dealer quote is rarely just the key. It bundles a part at counter price with a service-lane appointment, and where the car will not start at all, a tow to get it into the lane. Cutting and coding the key where the vehicle already sits takes out the second and third of those, and that is where most of the gap comes from rather than the blank itself.
What you actually pay depends on which key you have lost. A plain cut with no chip, a transponder key cut and programmed, a fob paired to the car, and an all-keys-lost job where nothing is left to copy from are four different pieces of work, and each is priced separately on the automotive locksmith page.
Both get handled on one visit. Suite work and commercial work in the same building are batched rather than booked as separate call-outs, which is the cheaper way to run it and the reason you get asked what else is on the list when you call. The retail half can also go after hours so that a storefront deadbolt changed after a staff or tenant departure does not cost you a trading day. The same pattern holds along Hastings Street in The Heights and in the Kingsway strip at Highgate, where the work is storefront deadbolts, back-of-house entries and display case locks rather than suite doors. Anything spanning several doors or several buildings gets a short walkthrough before a number is put on it.
Usually one thing: every exterior cylinder rekeyed to a single key. Rekeying re-stacks the pins so every key that existed before stops working, which is the point after a sale, a tenant changeover, a separation, or a renovation where contractors held a key for six weeks and copies cost a few dollars each. New infill and laneway builds have their own version of the problem, since the builder's key circulates among trades and subcontractors through construction and is still live on possession day. Older Brentwood rentals off Rosser Avenue sometimes produce a third outcome: the cylinder comes apart and turns out to be worn past reliable pinning, so it gets replaced on the same visit rather than booked for a second one.
A regular call in Buckingham Heights and along Government Road, where houses stay with one family for decades and a forgotten dial or an inherited floor safe comes with the property. Manipulation and dial analysis come first, and those open most of them without leaving a mark. Drilling is the last resort, and you hear about it before it happens, not after. Combination changes, dial-to-keypad conversions and moving a safe without damaging the safe or the floor under it are all part of the same visit.
BC Security Worker Licence E106677. It prints on every invoice, it can be read out on the phone, and strata corporations and property management companies are welcome to take it down for their records before booking anything. Nothing is subcontracted, so the licence you check belongs to the person who turns up.
Watch what the number does between the phone call and the doorstep. The version of this trade to avoid quotes $15–$35 to get a van sent, decides on your step that the lock is high-security or the job is more involved than it sounded, and the bill lands at $300–$600. The rest of the markers tend to arrive together: a business with no street address, a licence number nobody will put in writing, no identification offered at the door, and pressure to get the work started before a figure has been agreed.
The counter to all of it is dull. Ask for the licence number before you book, get the price for your own job while you are still on the call, and expect it to hold unless something on the door changes, in which case you should hear the reason before the work continues rather than afterwards on the invoice.
Anything that resolves to Coquitlam, whether that is past North Road at the Lougheed end or over the Brunette at Cariboo. The street address gets checked while you are still on the call, which is cheaper for both of us than working it out at the curb.
Up the mountain the dividing line is ownership rather than geography. Privately owned UniverCity condos and townhomes, the compact studios along University High Street, and the student rentals in basement suites and converted homes off Gaglardi are all served. The university's own buildings are not, since SFU runs a facilities team for those. Institutional work on campus can also call for licence verification on site and a security escort arranged by the client, which is easier to sort before a visit than at the door.
Fourteen areas, from the Hastings Street grid in The Heights to the Big Bend flats at the bottom of South Slope. Pick yours for hardware, pricing and route detail.