Why Is Re-keying Your Home Locks Vital And Important For Home Security?

Pictured here is a typical front door entrance set found commonly across the United States.

Many customers we visit, ask us to re-key their locks. It is one of a locksmiths principal service offerings.

But why is it a vital and important project upon buying, renting or moving to your new home, to re-key locks?

In our vast 35+ years of experience across four continents, we have re-keyed a great many lock systems for our customers. The obvious reason for re-keying your locks, is to lock out a key holder.

We attend many customers who rarely think to re-key their locks when they first move in to their new home or office. Many seem to think that previous owners or tenants have returned all the operating keys and that full disclosure indicates there are no additional operating keys "out there".

But time and again, we find that many homeowners are unaware that many of their new locks, installed by the building contractor, are in fact master-keyed. The reason their locks are master-keyed is often a building contractor or home construction company, will build more than one or two or three houses in a new locality and to minimize the number of different keys that each of their tradespeople are required to carry, to access each different property, the builder will order direct from the manufacturer, all their locks keyed to their master system. The builder will obviously hand over the individual operating keys for each new property to the new owner or agent, but many new homeowners are unaware that their new locks are actually master-keyed and will often delay or forget altogether to ensure no-one but they have keys or copies to their new home. Perhaps they are lured into a false sense of security that their new home is secure because they have original keys in their possession?

There are some builders who operate with integrity and install Construction Keyed locks to doors. And these builders will also instruct the customer to insert their individual operating key to all their new locks and in so doing, their construction keyed cylinders will naturally and automatically "switch off" the construction keying function.

We just came from another customer where we re-keyed their locks. In dismantling the cylinders we discovered master pins in multiple chambers, indicating (most likely) that these locks have never been changed, since original installation.

Now, here is the rub!


Because these locks were master-keyed, in all likelihood, the builder still maintains their master key system across all the homes they build. And it is also likely that most of the builders tradespeople also carry a copy of that key, if they work at different locations for that builder.

This indicates that if your locks have never been re-keyed since you moved in, there may be multiple copies of the original builders  master key "out there" and still in use.

There are probably a number of abstract people that now have key access to your home.

Do you know who has a key to your home?