Rekey or replace: what to do with commercial locks after a tenant leaves

Turnover is the moment commercial locks get attention, and it is usually the only moment. The choice is between rekeying the cylinders you have and replacing the hardware outright. Both are legitimate. They answer different problems.

What rekeying actually does

A pin tumbler lock opens because the cuts on the key lift a stack of pins to exactly the shear line. Rekeying means opening the cylinder, pulling those pins and fitting a different combination. The lock body, the latch, the strike and the trim all stay on the door. Every key cut to the old combination stops working the moment the cylinder goes back in.

That last sentence is the whole value. A rekey invalidates every copy in circulation, including the copies nobody declared. It makes no difference how many keys the outgoing tenant cut, or who they handed them to, or whether the handover envelope came back looking complete.

When rekeying is enough

Rekeying handles ordinary turnover. The hardware is sound, the door closes and latches, the cylinder turns cleanly, and the only live problem is that an unknown number of keys exist. That covers most tenant departures and most staff departures.

It also covers the departure that went badly. A rekey takes a fraction of the time a hardware swap does, and on a suite with several doors it can usually be finished inside a morning. When the priority is having the unit secure today, that gap decides it.

One point that gets missed: rekeying is not limited to the suite door. Roof hatches, electrical rooms, storage cages, gate cylinders and the padlocks on a compound are all part of the same exposure, and they are the ones left off the list.

When to replace instead

Four situations make replacement the right answer.

The hardware is worn out. A cylinder that binds, a latch that needs lifting into place, a lever with play in it. Rekeying a failing lock gives you a working key in a lock that was going to fail regardless, and you pay for the labour twice.

The access model is changing. Bringing a suite onto a master key system, putting a keypad on a back door, or fitting a card reader on a shared entrance. The combination is not what needs to change, the hardware is.

The keyway is uncontrolled. Standard keyways can be cut at any hardware counter, so a rekey stops the old keys working but does nothing to stop new ones appearing. On a property where key control genuinely matters, replacing the cylinders with a restricted keyway is the step that fixes it. Blanks for those are only supplied to the registered holder, so duplication needs your authorisation rather than a five minute walk.

The lock is wrong for the door. An exit door that needs panic hardware, a fire door that needs a self latching lock, a public entrance whose hardware cannot be operated the way accessibility requirements expect. Rekeying leaves the underlying problem in place and puts a fresh key in your hand to prove the door was serviced.

The register decides how well either one works

Whichever route you take, the value drains away without a record of who holds what. A key register is a list of every key issued, the door or group it opens, the person holding it, and the date it went out and came back.

Properties that keep one can answer the turnover question in a minute. Properties that do not end up rekeying everything on every departure, because there is no way to establish what a departing tenant could reach. Rekeying everything on every departure is the expensive way to run a building, and the cause sits in the records rather than in the locks.

We issue a written register with any master key work and update it on every visit that changes a key.

Sequencing it around a turnover

The practical order that avoids the common mistakes:

• Walk the unit before the tenant is out and list every cylinder, including the ones off the main circulation. Roof access, risers, cages, gates and padlocks belong on the list.
• Decide rekey or replace door by door rather than for the whole unit. It is normal to rekey six cylinders and replace one that was already failing.
• Do the work after the tenant's contractors are finished and before the incoming tenant's start. Fit out crews get issued keys, and those keys are a second uncontrolled population if the rekey happens too early.
• Issue against the register from the first key, rather than reconstructing it later from memory.

Costs, in the terms that matter

We will not quote figures here because they move with hardware, quantity and access. The relationship between them is stable though, and it is the part worth carrying into a budget conversation. Rekeying an existing cylinder is a labour job with a small parts cost. Replacing a lockset is a parts job with labour attached. Fitting a restricted keyway across a property costs more than either at the outset and reduces the cost of every turnover afterwards, because a rekey stays sufficient for longer.

On a property with regular tenant movement, the restricted keyway usually pays for itself. On a single tenant building with a stable occupier, it rarely does.

Where we sit on this

Locks and access control are performed by our own technicians. No Florida contractor licence is required for this work, so the person who surveys the doors is the person who does the job, and there is no third party between the quote and the work. We photograph the hardware, record what was rekeyed or replaced, and hand over the register the same day.