Restricted master key systems for Burnaby strata councils, property managers, Hastings Street landlords with a few units each, and the warehouse operators down at Big Bend. Everything from the suite door inward goes on one pinning plan, with controlled access and a written key chart you keep.
A manager's key for the building, change keys that open one door each, and a chart on file.
A master key system puts a set of doors on one pinning plan. Everyone carries a change key cut to their own door, and a manager's key sits above all of them. What holds it together is the keyway. A restricted profile uses blanks no hardware counter or kiosk stocks, so a key that leaves the building cannot quietly become three. That matters more in a Burnaby tower than on a detached street, where the key that walked opens a door inside a building hundreds of people enter daily. A walkthrough, a hierarchy on paper, cylinders pinned to it and a written key chart is the whole job.
One line we do not cross. The lobby fob reader, the parkade gate, the intercom panel and anything wired into the building access platform belong to the strata's access control contractor, and we leave that equipment alone. Our side starts at the suite door: entry deadbolts and handle sets, amenity and common room doors, storage and bike room cylinders, mailbox and locker hardware, and the retail units in the podium downstairs. A Metrotown council asking for one caretaker key almost always means exactly those doors, because the fob already carries the lobby and the parkade. Even in the newest Brentwood towers, where the suite door carries a building keypad, that cylinder belongs to the resident and can sit on the system.
Build era tells you most of what you need before anyone opens a door. Buildings from before roughly 2005, which covers the Edmonds walk-ups, the mid-century rentals off Rosser Avenue and older Metrotown stock, lean on KW1, the Kwikset keyway: cheap to pin, weak on pick resistance. Towers built after 2010 along the Brentwood and Lougheed corridors more often run SC1, the Schlage C keyway, or a proprietary restricted profile the developer specified. We carry SC1 and KW1 on the van. A restricted profile means ordered blanks and a few days.
When a council takes over from a previous management company, often nobody can say what keyway the building runs or whether a master already exists. That starts with a hardware assessment rather than a quote: pull one cylinder, identify the profile, check the pinning for a master wafer.
Cost tracks door count, cylinder condition and levels. A cylinder pinned for two levels sits higher in the per-cylinder band than a single-level one, because it gets pinned twice. These are the bands we quote across Burnaby, with the number confirmed after the walkthrough.
| Project | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Storefront or small office, 3–8 doors | $400 – $850 |
| Strata or mid-size commercial, 9–20 doors | $900 – $2,200 |
| Large building or multi-building site, 20+ doors | $2,500 – $6,000+ |
| Restricted blanks, per key, ongoing | $18 – $45 |
| Re-pinning existing hardware, per cylinder | $55 – $120 |
Parts and labour are inside those numbers for standard door prep. Certified restricted product, or doors never prepped to a standard bore, sits at the top of the band. This work is scheduled rather than dispatched, so the visit lands in a window that suits the building.
We sit with the council or the owner and list every door against every group. Caretaker, cleaners, trades, residents, commercial tenants downstairs. The hierarchy is settled on paper first.
We confirm the profile, order blanks if the building runs a restricted one, and cut a sample set to try. Standard keyways are cut in the van, which keeps a mid-size building to one attendance.
Cylinders go in or get re-pinned, every key is tried in the doors it should open and at least one it should not, and keys go out against a sign-off sheet. You keep the chart.
Most of the suite-level volume in Burnaby sits in the tower clusters on SkyTrain: Metrotown and Edmonds on the Expo Line, Brentwood Town Centre and Lougheed Town Centre on the Millennium Line. Requests from those buildings are rarely one suite. It is a floor at a time, or a whole building after a management handover, priced per cylinder.
Under about thirty units we can usually assess, quote and pin in one attendance. Above that the building manager has to line up access, because the job moves only as fast as suites can be opened. Where the elevator is on controlled access a building contact has to ride with us, and that time is in the quote. Give us the address, the suite numbers and the visitor stall level when you book, so the crew reaches the right elevator bank with the pinning kit instead of circling the parkade. Podium retail can sit under the same hierarchy, but it needs its own change key level, because a shop tenant handing back keys should never force a re-pin upstairs.
Not every master key system here is a tower. The Heights runs a walkable strip of independent shops, cafes and restaurants in multi-unit buildings along Hastings Street, and the standing request there is a landlord with three or four units who wants one key for all of them while each tenant keeps their own. Same pattern at the Willingdon Heights end of Hastings. Where units are tenanted, BC's Residential Tenancy Act generally requires landlord consent before a tenant changes a lock, and written notice before your locksmith visit keeps the courtesy going the other way.
Down past the Marine Drive curve at the foot of the South Slope, Big Bend is the warehousing flat, and the Brunette Avenue corridor in Cariboo does a smaller version at the Coquitlam line. Those run on shipping entries, man-doors and yard gates rather than suites, and industrial cylinders take weather a suite door never sees.
The small apartment buildings along Hastings, and the pre-1950s houses on the grid behind them, predate standardised cylinder prep. Mortise bodies and older lever sets turn up regularly there, and the oldest Edmonds blocks near the New Westminster line are no different. A mortise body can be master keyed, but it needs a cylinder of the right length and cam rather than whatever is on the shelf, so we measure at the door before promising a date. Edmonds also produces the deadbolt already rekeyed once from a hardware store kit, on mismatched pins. That is the cylinder that defeats a master system rather than merely a rekey: kit pins come in a coarser set of sizes than a master wafer stack needs, so the two will not share a plug and the lock has to come off the system or off the door.
Simon Fraser University has its own facilities team for university-owned buildings, so the work up there is the privately owned side of the plateau: UniverCity stratas, townhomes at the forest edge, rental blocks, and landlords running student housing off Gaglardi Way. Gaglardi is effectively the only road up and adds ten to fifteen minutes each way, so the blanks get cut before we drive it.
Strata towers, townhome complexes and storefronts right across the city. Pick an area for the local detail.
Licensed locksmith for the rest of it: residential, commercial and automotive.