Ask a Surrey homeowner how many keys the house takes and the answer is usually short by two. Front door, back door, a keyed gate, the attached garage handle, and on thousands of these streets a suite entry below that has to stay on a key of its own. We bring the cutter to the address, work the whole ring at once, and turn each house, suite, mailbox, padlock or high-security key in the lock it was cut for.
Most of this work is not an emergency. It is the errand that got skipped: the tenant copy for a basement suite in Panorama Ridge, the spare that stops a Fleetwood garage fob from being the only way in, the fresh issue a Sullivan strata needs after its property manager changes. Booked as an errand it costs a few dollars a key. Left until the last key goes missing it becomes a call-out.
Surrey was not built in one stretch, and the blank stock in the van has to reflect that. A single afternoon can take in an early-1980s two-storey off 72 Avenue in Panorama Ridge still turning the Kwikset deadbolt it was built with, a Guildford apartment on 104 Avenue that never left the keyway it first sold on, and a Clayton Heights townhouse handed over on builder-grade hardware some time after 2005. Push east past 200 Street and the mix shifts again toward the profiles that went into Fraser Valley construction between the 1970s and the 1990s. That is why the truck carries Kwikset KW1, Schlage SC1 and Weslock stock rather than one tray of whatever sells fastest. Where a keyway turns out to be genuinely uncommon, you hear it on the phone, and the conversation becomes whether rekeying onto a current standard beats hunting a blank for a fortnight.
| Key type | Typical range |
|---|---|
| House or suite door key, per copy | $5–$15 |
| Mailbox, padlock or cabinet key | $8–$20 |
| Five copies or more, per key | $4–$10 |
| Dimple key (Mul-T-Lock, Kaba and similar profiles) | $20–$45 |
| Restricted or high-security key, with authorization | $30–$70 |
| Cut from the lock or to code, no original | $40–$90 |
Blank and labour both sit inside those figures. The first row covers the bulk of what gets cut here. Controlled blanks and tighter tolerances move a job down the table, and decoding a cylinder because nothing is left to copy is the slowest of the lot, which is why it sits at the bottom. Give us the brand and any numbers off the key head and the figure is fixed before dispatch. Car keys are priced on their own page, for the reason set out below.
Callers ask for a spare and mean one. A detached Surrey house is usually three to five cylinders once the back door, a keyed gate and the garage handle are counted, and a suite entry makes it more. Give us the doors and the brand on the key head, and the blank stock travels out with the technician.
A driveway in Sullivan, a strata lobby off 104 Avenue, a gate out on 264th Street. There is no shop and no drop-off counter anywhere in this business, so your original stays in your hand and nobody keeps it overnight.
Each cut is checked against the original bitting and then tried in the lock it was made for. On a deadbolt repinned through several tenancies, a copy can measure right and still drag, and that is worth finding while a technician is standing beside it rather than a week later.
A key stamped Do Not Duplicate is doing a job, and a few patented profiles are never released to us in the first place, which gets settled while you are still on the call. On the profiles we are licensed for, authorization still has to be shown before the machine runs. A tenancy agreement, a utility bill addressed to the unit, or an email from the building's manager all do it, and a renter can produce one of those without involving the owner at all. The strata version is stricter and better. On the restricted master arrangements running through Cloverdale and Clayton Heights complexes such as Clayton Village and Salal, the building manager holds one key that opens every common door while each resident's cut works only their own lock, and every key number is written down. A spare on a system like that is issued against the record rather than copied off the key in your pocket, which is the whole reason the record is worth keeping. When a property manager changes, which the strata buildings around Sullivan Heights call about regularly, the clean answer is a fresh key record and a new issue rather than another round of copies chasing the old one.
A call to a Guildford strata is rarely about one key. The suite lock, the fob for the lobby and the deadbolt inside the suite frequently sit on three unrelated mechanisms, so the first question is what you are actually holding. Fobs are the one item on this page nobody can cut. They are programmed through the strata corporation's own access control system, which means a replacement comes from the manager or the management company, not from a locksmith, and no amount of brass solves it. Cylinders are a happier story. Plenty of the buildings along 104 Avenue, around the Guildford Recreation Centre and on the hospital catchment roads off 96 Avenue went up in the 1990s and early 2000s and are still on the Schlage B-series and Weiser keyways they first sold on. Ordinary blanks, clean copies. Landlords on those quieter streets just off 96 Avenue tend to order a full set at each tenant handover, and cutting several at one visit is what the third row of the table above is for.
The most common request we talk people out of is keying an entire house alike. Through Panorama Ridge a suite below the main floor is ordinary rather than unusual, and the same is true on the English Bluff Road side streets out in Tsawwassen. That lower entry belongs to a separate household. Put it on the owner's front-door key and the tenant has the run of the house, or the owner's key turns up in a tenant's drawer, depending which copy travelled. Cut the suite on its own, keep the owner's set for the main floor, the back door, the gate and the garage handle, and nothing has to be renegotiated when a tenancy ends. Keying alike is genuinely useful for the doors one household uses, and on a Panorama Ridge property that includes a detached garage still carrying a padlock or older mortise hardware. The line to hold is between households, not between doors.
Fleetwood residents carry three separate things to get into their own home: a garage fob, a mailbox key and a front-door key. That bundle is itself behind a good share of the lockouts there, and two cheap fixes come off a cutting visit. The first is a cut key for the garage side door, so the fob is not the only way through the garage. The second is labelling, because keys come off the machine identical and blank-faced, and four unmarked brass blades on a ring is a puzzle at eleven at night. We mark them before handing them over. The townhome strata along 160 Street, Fraser Highway and 88 Avenue mostly still run the standard Kwikset and Weiser hardware they were built with in the 1990s and early 2000s, and that hardware copies without argument decades on. The occasional worn cylinder does not, and on those the honest answer is a replacement rather than a fourth copy of a key that already drags.
At the southern edge of Langley Township the job stops looking like key cutting and starts looking like an inventory. A property off 264th or 272nd Street can carry a house, a detached garage, a workshop, a barn and a pair of gate padlocks, collected over decades and no two of them on the same key. The useful version of that visit is a walk of the whole property first, every exterior lock listed, and then either the lot rekeyed onto one key or a simple arrangement where the owner's key opens everything and separate cuts go to whoever works the land. Keys are cut on site the same day. Hardware out here takes more weather than it does in the city: the older houses between 264th and 272nd have frames that shifted through decades of Fraser Valley winters, and a cylinder that has stood in that for decades usually wants replacing rather than another copy fed into it.
The old townsite along Fraser Highway is where the bottom row of the table earns its keep. Those houses have original hardware, wooden frames that have moved, and deadbolts nobody has opened up in decades, and the version of the call we get most often is a 1960s Weiser cylinder with half a key snapped off inside it. There is nothing to copy. The cylinder itself holds the information, so it gets read and cut to, which takes longer than a duplicate and is priced as the last row rather than the first. It still beats discarding a lock body with years left in it. Two other things usually surface in the same visit. One is a strike plate knocked out of line by a frame that settled, so the bolt barely catches and the key gets blamed for it. The other is hardware layered on across several decades, single-cylinder deadbolts beside older knob sets, none of it matching, which is worth bringing onto one key while a technician is already at the door.
Dispatch runs from King George Boulevard, and what a visit looks like changes with the address more than with the distance. In City Centre it is a suite door in one of the post-2010 concrete towers off University Drive or Whalley Blvd, where the deadbolt is ordinary and the lobby runs on a fob we cannot help with. In Newton it is a set for an incoming tenant on the cul-de-sacs around Sullivan Heights, or a townhouse off 80th Avenue. South Surrey pushes the count up, because detached homes on Elgin Road and Panorama Place carry more outside doors than most, and the estate stock through Elgin Chantrell and Sunnyside Park runs multi-point hardware where the cylinder rather than the door is what gets touched. White Rock holds one of the highest concentrations of older condominium buildings on the south shore, the 1970s and 1980s blocks on Johnston Road and Marine Drive, where suites change hands steadily and a tested set is a normal part of the handover. Over at the Delta end, the village core around Delta Street and Chisholm Street still has mortise bodies and skeleton-key hardware untouched for decades, and those get answered on their own terms: the cylinder rekeyed where the mortise body is sound, or a modern deadbolt fitted to the existing door prep where it is not. Every one of those addresses sits inside the zone, and none of them carries a surcharge for the drive.
Car keys are not cut on this page. The blade is the small half of that job, and the half that sets the price is coding the key to the vehicle, which needs different equipment and a different van. Every key type has a row of its own over on the car key replacement page, and a fob whose buttons have simply stopped answering is often a battery and a re-sync rather than a new key at all.
Keyway age, blank stock and the number of doors on a property all change with the address. Pick an area for what actually turns up there.
A cut key is often not the whole answer. Everything below runs off the same truck with the same licensed technician.
Pick-, drill- and bump-resistant cylinders with keys that can’t be copied at the hardware store. Cut, pinned and registered in-shop.
Residential Security Container (RSC) burglary classification: a key-locked security container designed to provide entry…
Car keys are priced by vehicle. Pick what you need and we’ll collect your make, model & year to text you an exact quote.