The tools ride in the van and the work happens at your address. A person picks up at three in the morning rather than an answering service, the arrival window you are given is worked out for your own address from where the nearest technician is, and the job stays with a licensed technician on this crew rather than going to a subcontractor. 778.370.5594 is that line, every night of the year.
Two answers shape an emergency call here, and the technician wants both before the van moves. The first is which side of which door you are on. In a beachfront or uptown building that matters more than the street number, because the lobby side answers to whoever manages the property and only your own suite door is a locksmith's to open. The second is whether the door still works. A lockout is finished the moment you are inside. A door that has been forced, or a bolt that has given up on its own, is not finished until it locks again, and those two calls go out with different hardware aboard.
The fourteen areas on this site fall into seven groups. Your arrival window is given on the call, from where the nearest technician is, and what the table adds is the local reason a call in each group can take longer.
| Where you are | What moves it |
|---|---|
| Marine Drive, East Beach and West Beach | Summer traffic between the pier and the western end, and the BNSF crossings when a freight is going through |
| Uptown White Rock and Five Corners | Kerb parking on Johnston Road in business hours, and which entrance an upstairs apartment or a tower parkade uses |
| Semiahmoo | Very little. The grid around the Town Centre and 152nd Street routes cleanly once we have a street address |
| Ocean Park and Crescent Beach | The beach queue at the top of Crescent Road. The 1001 Steps join these two, but a van has to come round by 128th Street |
| Sunnyside, Grandview Heights and Rosemary Heights | Finding the right building on a strata site, which a unit number and the visitor entrance settle before we arrive |
| Elgin, Chantrell and Morgan Creek | The gate, and whether it was sorted out while we were still talking. GPS is unreliable on the older estate lanes |
| Hazelmere and Campbell Heights | Distance, plus a rural address that will not resolve |
Two things sit beside that table rather than inside it. A vehicle in one of the paid beach lots takes longer to reach than a car on the street, because what costs the time is the lot rather than the drive to it. And an overnight call on the waterfront is the easy end of the day rather than the hard one, since the parking that slows the strip in season has gone by then and a freight standing on a crossing is the only thing left that can hold the van up.
Anything on this list goes out immediately, at whatever hour it happens:
The figure is settled on the phone, before the van moves, and it is the figure on the invoice. The bands below are the emergency jobs this territory actually generates. Where a call lands inside its band comes down to the hardware on the door, the hour, and whether the door still locks once it is open.
| Job | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Residential lockout, standard deadbolt | $95 – $160 |
| Residential lockout, high-security or smart lock | $135 – $220 |
| Car lockout, most makes | $95 – $160 |
| Car lockout, push-start or complex entry | $130 – $200 |
| Break-in re-secure with the lock replaced | $160 – $300 |
| Rekeying the cylinder after all keys are lost | $110 – $185 |
| Broken key extraction | $90 – $150 |
| Commercial lockout, retail or restaurant | $120 – $250 |
The standard lockout bands are for the lockout itself, and the total for your address is confirmed on the call before the van moves. Nights, weekends and holidays carry the after-hours rate, and it sits inside the number you are quoted rather than being added to it afterwards. Home lockouts are the line that moves most, because a suite deadbolt from the 1980s and a mortise body older than anyone living behind it are not the same visit. Two or three questions about the door on the call is what settles which end of the band you are at, and nothing about that figure changes once the door is open unless you are told why before anything is touched.
Three stages, and the middle one is the part most people never see.
What is locked, where you are standing, and whether the property is secure while you wait. That last question is the one that reorders a night. Someone shut out of a suite is uncomfortable; a door left standing open on Marine Drive is a different problem, and it gets treated like one.
There is more than one way down to sea level, and the choice is made against the traffic at the time rather than fixed in advance. Johnston Road to Marine Drive is the usual run, and when the strip is busy a hill street off North Bluff Road can be the quicker drop. An address east of the pier may be reached from that end instead. It is also why dispatch asks for a cross street or a landmark rather than a block number, and why a freight going through the crossing is worth mentioning: say so and the estimate stays accurate.
Entry without damage is the first approach and on sound hardware it is also the last one. After that the technician deals with whatever put you outside, because a door you cannot secure is only half an answer at one in the morning. Fresh pins, a replacement cylinder, or a full deadbolt swap, decided at the door and priced before it starts.
A pick reads a cylinder that still moves. Close to the water that is worth checking rather than assuming, because a plug the salt has been working on has stopped cooperating with everyone equally, including us. This is the one honest exception to opening a door without marking it, and on a waterfront address the technician will name it before starting rather than after twenty minutes spent proving it. We carry replacement cylinders for exactly that reason, so the call ends with a door that locks instead of a door that merely opened.
Re-securing is the half of the job that decides whether the night actually ends. On newer stock it is one visit: the cylinder or the whole lockset comes off the truck and goes straight back on. The older cottage and walk-up doors around the beaches look like the harder case and usually are not, because the common mortise cylinder sizes are still manufactured, they ride in the van, and a modern cylinder normally drops into a lock body several decades older than itself and restores full function. The exception is an unusual cylinder profile, which is worth describing on the call, since it can generally be sourced the same day rather than turning into a second visit. Either way the door locks again before the technician leaves.
Car work is dispatched from the same desk and quoted the same way, which is why a locked car at midnight is not treated as a smaller emergency than a locked house. The full scope, tools and pricing sit on the automotive locksmith page, and everything about keys that no longer exist is on car key replacement. For the emergency version, the only thing worth knowing in advance is that a vehicle in a beach lot takes longer to reach than one parked on the street, as noted under that table, and that a car with no working key left anywhere is a longer visit than a car with keys visible on the seat.
All fourteen areas are dispatched to around the clock, not only the ones near the pier, and no group in that table is dropped after dark. What the hour changes is the traffic rather than the coverage. Gates are the one place it can work the other way: the entry process at an estate or a golf-community gatehouse is not always the same at two in the morning as it is at two in the afternoon, so it is worth raising on the call. The service areas page lays the territory out street by street if you want to see where your own address sits in it.
Yes, and at the same speed as anywhere else. The care buildings on North Bluff Road are the one part of the territory where our work is mostly planned, so it is worth saying plainly that the planning applies to rekeying programs and master key charts, not to a resident standing outside a suite at eleven at night. That call is dispatched first and the paperwork catches up in the morning.
It is the more urgent one. A bolt that will not retract, a handle that has failed on the inside, or a door that has dropped enough to jam in its frame all leave somebody shut in. On the mortise and rim hardware still fitted to the older cottage and walk-up doors around the beaches, the inside handle is part of the same lock body as the outside one, so when that body gives up the door stops working in both directions at once. Tell dispatch that is the situation when you call, because it changes what the technician brings up the path and how the door is opened.
It depends whether you can still get in. If you can, the urgency is not the door, it is the number of cylinders that key used to open, and on the larger properties out through Elgin, Chantrell and Morgan Creek that number is rarely just the front. Coach houses, workshops and secondary suite doors are the ones that get forgotten, usually by an owner who inherited them at a sale. Until every one of them is changed, the set of keys in circulation is still whatever it was yesterday.
We can, but the authorisation has to come from you rather than from the person at the door, and that is quicker to arrange by phone than it sounds. Booking it yourself while the guest waits is the shortest version. Worth separating the two problems, though: opening the door tonight solves the evening, while a cottage that has run a season of guests has a second question waiting, which is how many working keys are still out there.
Call while you are waiting. Nothing has to be touched before you are ready, and having the job already in dispatch means the technician can time the arrival to suit rather than starting the clock from scratch afterwards. Tell us what has actually been damaged if you can see it, since a broken cylinder and a broken frame need different things loaded before the van leaves.
Each one carries its own access notes. Pick the one you are standing in.
The work that gets booked rather than dispatched, done by the same licensed technicians.