Residential Locksmith Services
A house is not one lock. It is a front door, a back door, a slider onto the patio, a side door into the garage, a mailbox compartment, a shed, a gate, and often a safe nobody has opened since the last move. Most homeowners think about any of it only when one piece stops working. What follows is the residential work we do in South Florida homes and how to tell which service you need.
Rekeying or replacing: which one your door actually needs
These two get confused constantly, and the difference is worth knowing before you spend money. Rekeying keeps the lock body on the door and changes the pins inside the cylinder, so old keys stop working and a new key takes over. Rekeying a lock makes sense when the lock itself is sound — it turns smoothly, the bolt throws fully, the finish is not corroded through — and the only real problem is that you no longer know who holds a copy of the key. That covers most of the reasons people call: a closing, a move-out, a lost key, a housemate who left.
Replacement is the answer when the hardware itself is the problem. A cylinder rained on for fifteen years, a knob with a broken spring that leaves the latch hanging out, a builder-grade set that was thin when new — new pins in an old body buy you nothing there. New lock installation is also where you fix what the builder skipped: a proper grade of lockset, a longer bolt throw, a consistent keyway so one key opens the front, back and garage side doors instead of the three-key ring most houses accumulate.
Deadbolts, strikes, and the part of the door that actually fails
Most homeowners have never been told this: on a residential door the lock is rarely the weak point. The strike and the jamb are. A deadbolt can be excellent hardware and still sit in a strike plate held by two three-quarter-inch screws that bite nothing but thin trim board. The bolt is strong; the wood around it is not. When a residential door fails under force it is almost always the jamb splitting or the strike tearing out, with the deadbolt still locked and intact, riding along in a piece of broken frame.
That is why a serious deadbolt and strike job is as much carpentry as locksmithing. A reinforced strike box, screws long enough to reach the framing behind the jamb, and a bolt that throws its full length into a properly cut pocket do more for a door than a more expensive lock will. In pre-1970s frame houses the original jamb is softwood that has taken decades of humidity and repainting, soft enough in places to crush under a thumbnail; there the fix is to reinforce or replace that section of jamb rather than sink screws into wood that will not hold them. Concrete block houses, most of postwar South Florida, move the weak point: the buck is anchored into the block, so the jamb is solid and the question becomes how the strike is fastened to it. If you are adding protection to a door that currently has only a knob, adding a deadbolt to a door that does not have one is one of the more meaningful upgrades available, provided the strike side is done correctly at the same time.
Lockouts, broken keys, and locks that have stopped cooperating
Getting shut out of your own house is ordinary — a door that latched behind you, a key left inside, a lock that seized after months of warning nobody read. A house lockout is handled by opening the door with the least invasive method that works, and in most cases the lock survives and keeps its key. When a lock is too worn for that, we say so before starting rather than after.
Broken key extraction is its own job. Keys snap when the blade has worn thin, or when a worn key is forced in a worn lock. The fragment has to come out without scoring the plug or driving the pieces deeper, and the next question is why it broke — a key that snaps is usually telling you the cylinder is binding.
Lock repair covers doors that stick, bind or will not latch. A door that has to be lifted or shoved before the key turns is a door whose geometry has moved: humidity swells the slab, hinges sag, settlement shifts the frame, and the bolt stops finding the strike squarely. Forcing it eventually breaks something. The correct sequence is to fix the alignment — hinges, strike position, sometimes the bolt pocket — then check the lock. A lockout at an inconvenient hour, or a door left unsecured after an accident, falls under emergency locksmith service, where the priority is getting the opening closed and locked again properly.
The doors that are not the front door
Sliding glass and patio doors matter here, because South Florida homes have so many of them and because the factory hardware on them is usually the cheapest part of the assembly. The standard mortise latch is a small hook engaging a keeper in the jamb, easy to defeat by lifting the panel in its track. Proper slider work means a functioning mortise lock, an auxiliary foot bolt or pin lock tying the panel to the frame, and anti-lift blocking in the upper track. Rollers matter too: a slider that has to be fought to close gets left unlocked.
Mailbox locks are more complicated at a cluster kiosk than people expect. There the USPS holds the master arrow lock on the delivery side and the association owns the individual compartment locks, so we can replace or rekey a compartment lock for a homeowner or a board but cannot touch the postal side. Knowing which is which before we arrive saves everyone a trip.
Garage side doors and sheds get forgotten. The garage side door often carries the weakest hardware on the property while opening into a space with tools, bikes and an unlocked interior door to the house. Sheds and utility enclosures need hardware chosen for weather, not price. Gates are their own category: exterior gate hardware corrodes, and pool gates carry a legal requirement — Florida residential pool barriers must be self-closing and self-latching, with the release out of a small child’s reach. We install and repair pool gate latches to that standard, worth checking if a gate has ever been rehung.
Smart locks and keypads, discussed honestly
Smart locks solve a specific set of problems well. They eliminate the physical key handoff — useful for a house with cleaners, a dog walker, family on different schedules, or a rental turnover — and a keypad deadbolt lets you issue a code per person and change it later.
What they do not do is make a door stronger. A keypad deadbolt in the same weak jamb is the same weak jamb. Electronics add batteries that die, and outdoor keypads in coastal air do not love salt. Not every door prep or backset accepts every unit, and that check comes before the old lock comes off. The plainest advantage of a keypad is the least exciting one: for a landlord doing turnovers, or a homeowner tired of hiding a key, keyless entry removes the copied-key problem entirely. That is a real benefit, and it is the one worth buying it for. If you also want to see who is at the door, camera installation answers a separate question: a lock controls entry, a camera creates a record.
Safes, master keys, and keys other people cannot copy
Safe work covers opening a safe when the combination is lost or the lock has failed, servicing the mechanism, and changing the combination — the step people skip after buying a used safe or inheriting one, and the one that matters most, since you have no idea who knows the current numbers. Mechanical dials drift and need servicing; electronic keypads fail and need a lock swap, not a new safe.
Master keying is not only a commercial idea. A house with a guest suite, a converted garage apartment or a rented room follows the same logic: the tenant’s key opens their door and nothing else, while your key opens everything. A master key system laid out properly keeps those levels separate instead of blurring them.
Key duplication is simple until it is the problem. A key stamped with a common keyway can be copied at any hardware counter by anyone holding it, without your knowledge. For a rented unit, a guest suite, or a house where keys have circulated for years, a restricted keyway a tenant cannot copy puts duplication back under your control: the blanks are not sold on the open market, and copies come only with your authorization.
Moving in, renting out, and knowing what is on your door
The single most common residential job is a rekey after a closing, and the reason is straightforward. When you buy a house you inherit every key the previous owner ever handed out, and neither of you can account for all of them — the realtor, the cleaners, the pool service, the neighbor who watered plants. Nobody involved is a villain; the keys simply exist, and there is no way to collect them. Rekeying on day one ends that history, and it is the natural moment to bring the whole house onto a single key.
Landlords and vacation-rental owners run that reset at every turnover — a rekey between tenants, or a keypad whose code changes per guest. A home security survey is the wider version of that conversation: we walk the property with you, look at every opening rather than the one that prompted the call, and say plainly which doors are fine and which carry hardware that has quietly failed. It usually turns up a slider or a garage side door nobody had thought about.
What South Florida does to hardware
Salt air is the constant. Near the coast, chloride works into pin chambers and binds the plug, brass blooms green and then pits, and aluminum levers grow a chalky oxide that jams the return spring. Strike screws corrode from the inside before anything shows on the face. Stainless components, marine-grade fasteners, keeping dissimilar metals apart and a dust cover over an outdoor keyway do more for how long a lock lasts than the price of the lock does.
The 2002 Florida Building Code is the other line worth knowing. Since it took effect, exterior openings in this wind zone are approved as complete assemblies — slab, frame, anchoring and locking hardware together. On an impact-rated door, cutting a fresh prep or swapping a listed multipoint lock for a surface deadbolt can put the opening outside its approval. The workable path is to stay inside the manufacturer’s prep — a matching multipoint gearbox, the correct cylinder length for the stile, a keyway you can live with. Older houses bring their own quirks: jalousie windows on a Florida room are pleasant in February and close to useless as a barrier, an argument for securing the interior door behind them.
HOA and gated-community rules govern more front doors here than people expect. Associations often specify finish or style, or require hardware to match across a building, and some restrict what may be mounted on the exterior face of a unit door at all. Checking the architectural guidelines before ordering avoids installing something you will be asked to remove.
Getting in touch
When a lock fails, most people start with a phone search for a locksmith near me and hope whoever answers is licensed, insured, and willing to explain the work before doing it. The communities we cover are listed on our service areas page.
Pro Locksmith Fort Lauderdale is licensed and insured and provides residential locksmith service across Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties. Call (954) 406-8266.
Residential services in detail
- Lock rekeying
- Lock installation and replacement
- Sliding glass and patio door locks
- Smart locks and keyless entry
- Mailbox and cluster box locks
- Safe opening and installation
- Professional safe opening
- Broken key extraction
- House lockouts