Apartment and Property Management Rekeying
This is not one rekey. It is a process that has to survive dozens of them a year without losing track of a single key.
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Rental property rekeying is defined by turnover. A unit changes hands, the outgoing tenant's key has to stop working, the incoming tenant needs a key nobody else holds, and maintenance still has to be able to get in. Repeat that across a building and the difficulty stops being mechanical and becomes clerical.
The structures that make it manageable are the commercial ones applied differently. Units sit under a maintenance master so staff carry one key instead of fifty. Common doors — the lobby, the laundry, the mail room, the gate — sit on a separate key that every resident holds and that changes only when something happens. Interchangeable cores turn a turnover into a swap at the door rather than a bench visit.
What a turnover rekey has to cover
- The unit door itself, re-pinned or re-cored to a combination the previous tenant never held.
- Everything else that unit key touched — a mailbox, a storage cage, a garage door remote or a patio gate, which are the parts routinely forgotten until a new tenant asks.
- The maintenance master, which has to keep opening the unit afterwards without handing the tenant access to anything beyond their own door.
- Common doors, which are not touched at every turnover but do need changing when a key is lost rather than handed back.
- The record — which combination sits in which unit, so the next turnover does not quietly reissue a cut used two tenants ago.
What makes a portfolio easy to service
- A unit list with a door count per unit, including mailboxes and storage.
- Whether the building already runs a master system, and whether its chart still exists.
- Whether the cylinders are interchangeable cores, which turns a turnover into a swap.
- A stated rule for what triggers a common door change, so it is not argued case by case.
- Who is authorised to request keys, and how a key is handed over to a new tenant.
If this is a single home you have just moved into rather than a managed portfolio, the job is smaller and the priorities are different. see rekeying after moving.
Common questions
How quickly can a unit be turned over?
Faster than most people expect where interchangeable cores are fitted, because the core is pinned in advance and swapped at the door in moments. Fixed cylinders take longer, since each is re-pinned in place. The real variable is the number of extra openings attached to the unit, not the unit door itself.
A tenant lost a key that opened the lobby. Does the whole building change?
If that key reached a common door, then every cylinder it opened should change, which is exactly why common doors and unit doors are normally kept on separate keys. Losing a unit key becomes a one-unit problem; losing a key that opens the building becomes a building problem.
Can maintenance keep one key for every unit?
That is what a maintenance master is for and it is the normal arrangement. The important detail is that it works in one direction only: staff open every unit, tenants open nothing but their own. It also means a missing master is a serious event, so controlling copies of that one key matters more than anything else in the system.
Do units have to be rekeyed between every tenant?
Treat it as the default. There is no way to know how many copies the outgoing tenant made or gave away, and the work is short compared with the consequences of guessing wrong. Where cores are interchangeable there is very little reason ever to skip it.
Related locksmith services
Describe the lock or key problem
A short description of what happened gets the right tools on the vehicle.
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