A Surrey rekey is rarely one cylinder, and the first thing we settle is not rekey or replace. It is which doors share a key and which are deliberately kept apart.
Two decisions come out of a Surrey lock job and only one of them usually gets discussed. The first is whether the cylinder on the door takes a fresh pinning or has to come off. The second is the key plan: how many keyed openings the property has, and which of them are supposed to answer to the same key. In a city where a detached house routinely carries a rented suite on its own entrance, the second decision is the one with consequences after we drive away.
The default request is one key for everything, and on a Surrey townhouse that is normally the right answer. On a Surrey detached house it often is not.
Secondary suites are built into the fabric of whole neighbourhoods here. Panorama Ridge is the clearest case: two-storey houses on conventional lots, built out through the 1980s and 1990s, where a suite below with its own entrance is ordinary rather than unusual. Those entrances are commonly on a different key from the main floor and they should stay that way. What the owner actually wants is independent keying rather than a master, meaning the owner doors on one key, the suite on its own, and no master tying the two together. The same holds on the English Bluff Road side streets in Tsawwassen, where a suite gets rekeyed on its own at the end of a tenancy and nothing else on the property is touched.
Then there is the count. The openings people leave out are the keyed gate and the garage side door, and both turn up right across the zone: garage side-door hardware is routine work in Newton, Clayton Heights and Walnut Grove, and on an attached garage the handle is usually keyed too. Tell us how many keyed openings there are, not how many doors the house has.
What moves these figures is the number of cylinders and the condition of each one. Nothing on the table changes because of which neighbourhood it is quoted in. You get a range on the phone; the firm number is settled at the door, before a cylinder comes out.
| Job type | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Rekey, one deadbolt | $65–$95 |
| Rekey, deadbolt plus knob set on the same door | $90–$130 |
| Rekey, whole house (3–5 locks) | $140–$220 |
| Lock change, mid-grade deadbolt supplied and fitted | $150–$260 |
| Lock change, Grade 1 high-security deadbolt | $220–$380 |
| Extra key cuts (per key, on-site) | $8–$18 |
Counting the gate and the garage side door before you call is what decides whether you land on the single-deadbolt row or the whole-house row. Keeping a suite on its own key is not a second job: it is a second key cut on the same visit, off the last row.
How many openings take a cut key, and whether any of them is a separate suite entrance meant to stay off the main key. That second answer changes the key plan rather than the price, and it is easier to hear before the pinning than after.
Surrey properties do not always run one keyway, so each cylinder is identified at the door instead of being taken on trust. Kwikset and Schlage re-pin kits ride on the van, with replacement deadbolts from Schlage and Kwikset behind them, and Weiser or Yale on request.
Most single-door jobs take 20 to 40 minutes. What sets the length of a longer visit is the number of cylinders, not the address. Keys are cut on site, and on a property with a suite the last check of the visit is that the suite key gets nowhere in the owner doors.
Keying alike depends on the keyways agreeing, and on newer stock they generally do because one builder fitted the lot in a single pass. The old Cloverdale townsite along Fraser Highway is the exception that comes up most. Hardware went onto those houses in layers over decades, so a single-cylinder deadbolt can sit on one door and an older knob-lock set on the next, with the occasional 1960s Weiser cylinder still in service. Where that is the situation, swapping one cylinder so it can join the rest is cheaper than working around the mismatch, and you hear which door that is before anything comes off.
The other limit worth stating plainly is the fob. A rekey reaches the cylinders you hold a cut key for, and nothing that opens on a chip. A Fleetwood townhome resident is typically juggling a garage fob, a mailbox key and a front-door key, and only the last of those is ours to re-pin. A lost building fob is a separate call: on a proprietary strata system the replacement is issued by your property manager, and on a standard fob system we can sometimes help, but neither one is a rekey.
Walnut Grove is the clearest example of hardware that has simply never been reset. It is a post-1990s planned community running almost entirely on strata titles, and the townhome rows along Walnut Grove Drive, 202A Street and the quieter crescents behind Hyland Elementary are frequently still on the locks the builder fitted, now well past their first decade of daily use.
In Clayton Heights the trigger is the resale rather than the tenancy. Complexes there, Clayton Village and Salal among them, went up largely after 2005 on builder-grade deadbolts, and that hardware takes a fresh pinning without complaint, so a change of ownership costs a re-pin rather than a set of new locks. Moving up a security grade at the same time is a separate line on the quote, priced from the lock change rows above.
White Rock runs on a different clock. The city holds one of the highest concentrations of older condominium buildings on the south shore, and many of the strata buildings along Johnston Road and Marine Drive went up in the 1970s and 1980s, so suites there change hands against ageing cylinder hardware and older master-key systems rather than builder locks. Where the answer is a building-wide hierarchy instead of a suite rekey, that work sits on the master key systems page.
Where a landlord or a council is turning over more than one suite at a time, give the number at the booking. The whole set then gets pinned in sequence on one scheduled attendance, which is a different exercise from calling us back three times in a fortnight.
The rural edge of the zone turns the job inside out. On an Aldergrove acreage the work is not a door, it is an audit: house, garage, outbuildings and any secondary structures looked at together and brought onto a single key or a master arrangement, with the keys cut on site the same day. Gate padlocks, outbuilding deadbolts, and workshop and barn hardware are counted in rather than treated as extras.
The hardware out there is older and less standard than anything on the Surrey grid. Older homes between 264th and 272nd Streets often carry tired cylinders and non-standard door preparations, so mortise cylinders and euro-profile cylinders travel alongside ordinary deadbolts. The same applies to the acreage properties out on 232nd Street and around Gloucester Industrial Estate in Langley Township, where padlock chains and secondary gates belong in the count from the start.
Every area below sits inside the coverage zone. The key plan changes far more between a strata suite and an acreage than it does between one neighbourhood and the next.
A new key often arrives beside something else: a door that stopped latching, a smart lock going on, or a building-wide key hierarchy.
Pick-, drill- and bump-resistant cylinders with keys that can’t be copied at the hardware store. Cut, pinned and registered in-shop.
1/2" steel door, digital keypad, fitted and bolted on site.
Car keys are priced by vehicle. Pick what you need and we’ll collect your make, model & year to text you an exact quote.