NEW HOME BUYER?
If you just recently purchased a new home, congratulations! I'd like to take a moment and go over a few things you might want to consider about your locks on your home. There are some things that you might not have thought about and some things you might have not known could even be an issue. Your home is the number one place where you want to feel safe and comfortable. Here are a few things to consider to make sure that it is.
First of all, anytime you purchase a new home you want to get it re-keyed. How many times in the past have you given a key out to someone to take care of things while you were away? Everyone has. How can you be sure that when you purchased this house that all copies ever made of the key are accounted for and in you possession? Unless this is a brand new home just built for you, you probably can't. Also if this house is a new build there is another issue we need to go into. When the home builders come through and construct these homes, they almost always CONSTRUCTION MASTER KEY them. Construction master keying is a way to manipulate the lock so that the workers have access to all the homes until they are built and possession is taken over by the owner. At that point when the home owner inserts their key into the lock and turns it, a process happens that voids out the contractors key and the contractor should no longer have access to the property. This is a common practice and does function as intended. The only caveat to that is any time master pins are inserted into a lock it exponentially adds to the number of keys that inadvertently work the lock. Even though the contractor's keys won't work it and your neighbor's keys won't work it, there are quite a few other keys out there that will.
Secondly, is there one key that currently works all the locks or is there multiple keys? Do you want to have just one key or are you ok with the possibility of multiple? There are many reasons why the house could currently be on multiple keys. In fact when Hood's Locksmith Service goes out to rekey a home it is more time than not that there are multiple keys to the house. Maybe a lock broke and the previous home owner just went to the hardware store and grabbed a new one. Maybe they had a lockout situation and the person that came out to let them back in drilled out the lock and replaced it with whatever they had. There are quite a few scenarios to explain it, just don't automatically assume that they are all on the same key. It is not a common occurrence that I have seen. A locksmith can advise you on what needs to happen to make sure all of your locks operate the way you want them.
Lastly, maybe you don't want to have to always use a key to access your home. Well there are options for that also. Keypad locks are the new thing everyone seems to want these days. They do offer quite a bit of convenience but do sacrifice a little bit of security. There are many options from Smart Home Wi-Fi enabled, stand alone, audit trails, multi user, and so on. They are very convenient if you are a techy person, but do have some draw backs. Anytime something is hooked up to the internet there is a possibility, even though in most cases a small one that the lock could be accessed by someone you did not give permission to. There are locks that are stand alone that do not hook up Wi-Fi that are more secure, but you need to make sure your pin code is something not easily guessed. You also definitely want to make sure that they have a key override in case the battery happens to die. These locks do have a lot of benefits for certain people and can simplify a lot of would be issues for the on the go person of today.
In conclusion, It is a really good idea to get those locks re-keyed when you take possession of your new home. Hood's Lock would be glad to assist with the process of finding what solution works best for you and then getting it done for you. Please feel free to contact us with any questions you may have.
