Emergency Locksmith Services
Almost every call on this page starts the same way: someone is standing outside something they own, the lock works, and the key is on the wrong side of it. What changes is the opening — a house, a condo unit, a car with the engine still running, a shop’s back door, a safe, a mailbox bank, a pool gate. Those are different jobs with different methods, and treating them as one undifferentiated “lockout” is how people end up with a drilled cylinder they never needed.
Safe lockout? We also provide professional safe opening — non-destructive methods first.
This page is a map: what each situation involves, and what has to be established before work begins. If you already know which category you are in, the pages for house lockouts, car lockouts and business lockouts go further into method.
Houses, Apartments and Condos, and Who Can Authorise Entry
A single-family house is the simplest case in law and often the fussiest in practice. Most residential cylinders open non-destructively — picked, raked, or bypassed at the latch where the door and frame allow it. Drilling is a last resort rather than an opening move, honest only when the cylinder resists manipulation by design, when the lock has already failed mechanically, or when replacing it is the cheaper path anyway. Anyone who arrives with a drill in hand before looking at the door is telling you something about how they work.
Apartments and condominiums add a question that has nothing to do with hardware: who is entitled to have this door opened. The answer is whoever has a present legal right to occupy the unit — normally the tenant named on the lease or the unit owner, or an occupant who can show the unit is their residence. It is not the landlord acting alone against a tenant in possession, and it is not the association. A management company can authorise work on common-area doors it controls, but not entry into a private unit, and where the two get confused the correct response is to stop and get the right signature.
Storm season adds a variant that is not a lockout. After heavy wind and rain, doors swell and frames shift, and a leaf that used to close no longer latches. The lock gets blamed because the lock is the part you touch. The repair is resetting the strike in sound material with long fasteners, or repairing a jamb gone soft — a door that will not latch will not lock either.
Cars: Running Engines, Trunks and the Keys Inside Them
Vehicle lockouts split into a few situations. The ordinary one is a key or fob on the seat behind a locked door, opened with wedges and a long-reach tool, or with a model-specific technique where the interior trim makes reaching in unwise. A running car with the doors locked is the same problem with a fuel gauge attached, and worth mentioning on the first call. Keys shut in the trunk is a different job again: some vehicles release from the cabin once the cabin is open, others need a rear seat pass-through, and a few require the boot lock addressed directly.
Then there is the case where the key is not in the car because it no longer exists. A lost transponder key or proximity fob is not an opening job but a key origination job — cutting to code or to the lock, programming the new key, and where wanted, invalidating the old one so a found key stops working. That sits with our automotive locksmith service rather than with roadside opening.
Businesses, Offices and Commercial Openings
A locked-out business has a different clock than a household — staff outside, deliveries arriving, a register nobody can open. The doors differ too. A narrow-stile aluminium storefront with a mortise cylinder driving a hookbolt is not opened the way a residential deadbolt is, and a hollow metal service door with a rim exit device behaves differently again.
Authority matters here as well. We work from whoever can demonstrate control of the premises: the owner, an officer, a named manager, or the tenant of record. A former employee with a grievance and a good story is what the identification step exists to catch. Where a lockout turns out to be tired hardware — a dropped pivot, a closer that no longer pushes the door far enough to latch, a worn keeper — a repair beats a repeat visit, and that sits with our commercial locksmith work.
Broken Keys, Snapped Ignitions and Seized Locks
Keys break because metal fatigues. A brass key turned in a stiff lock for years develops a crack at the shoulder and eventually parts, leaving the blade inside the plug. Extraction is a defined procedure with proper tools — spiral and thin double-hook extractors, sometimes two worked together. Pushing the fragment deeper with a paperclip or flooding the cylinder with penetrating oil only makes the job harder.
A key snapped in an ignition is the same failure in a worse place. Ignition wafers wear before anything else does, the key starts to need a wiggle, and one morning it needs a wiggle too many. Extraction is often possible in place; where the cylinder has worn past service, the honest repair is a replacement cylinder keyed to the existing key rather than an extraction that will fail again.
Locks seize for reasons that are usually environmental: salt air and humidity corrode exterior hardware, gate padlocks and beach-facing entries especially. A cylinder forced past its resistance may also have a sheared cam or bent tailpiece, which no lubricant resolves.
Lost Keys Versus Stolen Keys
These sound similar and are not the same problem. A lost key is an access problem: you cannot get in, and a replacement restores the situation. A stolen key is a security problem: someone else can get in, and opening your door does nothing about that. The same applies to a key handed back by a former tenant or employee that may have been copied first.
The answer to a stolen key is not a lockout call but a lock rekey. Rekeying repins the existing cylinders to a new key, so every previous copy stops working at once, and it usually costs less than replacing locks because the hardware stays on the door. Where a household or business wants the number of working keys to stay equal to the number actually issued, a restricted keyway is the companion measure, since those blanks cannot be duplicated at a retail counter.
Break-Ins, Vandalism and Damage to Frames and Strikes
After a forced entry, the lock is rarely the only casualty and frequently not the real one. Doors are usually defeated at the frame: the strike tears out of the jamb, the jamb splits behind it, or the door edge deforms around the bolt. A new deadbolt in that damaged jamb reproduces the original weakness. The repair worth doing is a box strike anchored with long screws into the framing, replacement of the split section, and a reinforcement plate where the edge has been chewed.
Vandalised hardware has its own pattern — glue packed into a cylinder, a keyway deliberately damaged, an exit device wrenched out of alignment. Where a door or glazed panel cannot be made secure the same visit, boarding the opening is a legitimate interim step and should be described as exactly that: a temporary closure, not a repair. As for changing locks afterwards, if entry was by force, new cylinders alone do not address what let the door go; if it was by key, or the method is unknown, rekeying every exterior opening including the garage-to-house door is the baseline.
Evictions, Legal Lockouts and Documentation
Lock changes carried out as part of an eviction are a legal act, not just a mechanical one. In Florida a landlord cannot simply change the locks on a tenant in possession; removal runs through the courts and ends with a deputy present to execute a writ of possession. A locksmith’s role begins there, and only there.
In practice the documentation is the job. We expect to see the writ and the officer executing it, we record who instructed the work and when, and we hand keys to whoever the officer identifies as entitled to them. A landlord asking for locks to be changed on an occupied unit without that paperwork is asking for something we decline — an unlawful lockout exposes the owner to real liability. Commercial evictions run a different procedure.
Safes, Mailboxes, Gates and the Rest of It
Much emergency work involves openings that are not doors:
- Safes. A forgotten combination, a dead battery in an electronic lock, or jammed boltwork. Battery replacement and combination changes are routine; a genuine safe opening is slower and methodical, and whether the safe survives depends on the safe.
- Mailboxes. Private cluster boxes and association kiosks, where the association owns the housing and the resident owns the compartment lock. Boxes served by the postal service have their own rules.
- Gates and pool gates. Side yard gates, and pool enclosure gates required to be self-closing and self-latching. A pool gate whose latch no longer catches is a safety item as much as a security one.
- Padlocks, cabinets and storage. Storage units, sheds, roll-up shutters, gate chains and the small wafer locks on file cabinets and cash drawers.
What to Have Ready, and What We Should Ask You
Two things make a call go smoothly: what you tell us before anyone drives anywhere, and what we ask when we arrive. A locksmith who does not ask for identification is a warning sign rather than a convenience — that check is the only thing between your front door and someone who merely claims to live behind it. Have this ready:
- The exact address, including unit or suite number, and any gate or building access in the way.
- Whether you are the owner or the tenant, and whether anyone else has to authorise the work.
- What kind of door and lock it is — knob, deadbolt, glass storefront, mortise, keypad, multipoint on a French door.
- For a vehicle: year, make, model, whether the engine is running, and whether the keys are visible inside.
- Whether the key is lost, stolen, broken in the lock, or simply on the other side of the door.
- Photographic identification, and something tying you to the address — a lease, a utility bill, a deed, a registration, mail in your name.
We cover Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties. If you arrived here from a search for a locksmith near me, our service areas page lists the cities we actually work in, and our emergency locksmith in Fort Lauderdale page covers that city in more detail.
Pro Locksmith Fort Lauderdale is licensed and insured and handles emergency lock and key work for homes, vehicles and businesses across the three counties. Call (954) 406-8266.