A lockout here is rarely just a lock. It is a suite door behind a lobby door in a Lonsdale tower, a driveway at the end of a Chartwell crescent with no through traffic, or a car sitting where Mount Seymour Parkway runs out. Fast Locksmith North Vancouver answers 778-262-1107 24 hours a day, settles the address and the price on the call, and sends the nearest van. Arrival windows run 18–25 minutes on the Lonsdale corridor and 25–35 out at Deep Cove, and the one that belongs to your address is quoted on the call.
An emergency is any door, vehicle or safe you cannot open or cannot secure, and what makes one different on the North Shore is usually not the hardware. It is the hour. At two in the afternoon a strata office answers its phone, a concierge is at the desk, a neighbour is home to hold a lobby door, and somebody at the management company can tell you which key opens what. At two in the morning none of that is true, and the fastest van on the road still arrives to a front entrance that the caller has no way to release. A good share of what the dispatcher asks you on an emergency call is about reaching the door at all.
The calls sort themselves by geography more than by service. The Lonsdale corridor produces suite lockouts and parkade lockouts, because that is where the density sits and because the Quay parkade and the metered lots on Lonsdale Avenue fill with people who arrived on the SeaBus and left in a hurry. Lynn Valley, Lynnmour and Seymour produce house and townhome lockouts, and doors that stop latching after a wet week. Deep Cove, Caulfeild and the British Properties produce the calls where the drive is most of the job. All of them are dispatched from one number that covers both municipalities.
The hour decides one more thing: whether you sleep behind a working lock. Nothing is open on the North Shore at three in the morning. No supply house, no hardware counter, no building office. Whether your door locks again tonight is settled by what was already loaded on the van before the phone rang, which is why the technician wants to know what the door is while you are still on the call rather than after pulling up outside it.
Every figure below is a band, and the one that applies to your call is settled on the phone before a van moves. What shifts a job inside its band is the lock type, the vehicle, and whether the hardware has to be replaced rather than simply reopened.
| Service | Typical range |
|---|---|
| House lockout (standard deadbolt) | $85 – $140 |
| House lockout (high-security or smart lock) | $130 – $200 |
| Car lockout (most passenger vehicles) | $85 – $150 |
| Broken key extraction (door) | $75 – $130 |
| Broken key extraction (ignition) | $110 – $200 |
| All keys lost (re-key) | $110 – $180 per lock |
| Emergency lock replacement | $150 – $280 (hardware included) |
| After break-in repair (door + frame) | $180 – $400 |
Figures are in Canadian dollars and confirmed at the door before anything starts. Neither the hillside nor the drive carries a premium of its own, so an Upper Lonsdale call-out, an Edgemont one and a run out to Horseshoe Bay are quoted the way a Lonsdale Avenue call is. What can be added to a figure is named on the phone rather than found at the door: automotive work between midnight and 6 am, and an after-hours or weekend call-out. Payment on site is cash, debit or card.
A dispatcher picks up 778-262-1107 at any hour, not an automated router. Three answers usually set the whole job: whether you are outside the building or only outside your own suite, whether the key is lost or still in your hand, and whether anyone has forced the door. A price band and an arrival window both come back on that same call.
Norgate runs 15–20 minutes and the Lonsdale corridor 18–25. Lynn Valley and the Seymour side run 20–30. Deep Cove and Caulfeild run 25–35, Horseshoe Bay 25–40, and the ski lots at the top of Mount Seymour Parkway 30–40. The window you are quoted belongs to where you are standing, so give the nearest cross street with the address and stay somewhere you can hear a phone, because the call on approach is how a technician finds an unlit driveway.
Non-destructive entry comes first. If a cylinder has to be drilled you hear why and agree to it before it happens, and a replacement goes on in the same visit instead of leaving a hole in a door overnight. Common residential keyways ride on the van, Schlage, Kwikset and Weiser among them, and on the rare call where a part is genuinely missing the return trip is not billed.
Above roughly 21st Street, and again up on the Edgemont plateau, a January night can take an exterior cylinder out of service by morning. It matters at the moment it happens rather than afterwards, because the instinct in the cold is to put more shoulder into the key, and that is what turns a twenty-minute call into a longer and dearer one. A key snapped off inside a stiff plug is an extraction job and it is priced as one on the table above. Stop turning, ring the number, and say on the call that the address is up the hill and the overnight went below zero. It changes what the technician loads before setting off.
The streets this comes from are consistent: Jones Avenue, the blocks running toward Montroyal Boulevard, Larson Road and the addresses climbing toward the lower edge of Grouse Mountain Road. A winter call and a summer call to the same doorstep up there are not the same visit, and the waterfront addresses a few minutes downhill will not have had the same night. Getting you in is the emergency. The permanent answer is a weather-resistant cylinder with a rotating cover, which is a booked job in daylight rather than a midnight one.
A business that cannot open loses a morning. A business that cannot close is standing there with the lights on, and that is the version that arrives after dark. A key snapped in a storefront cylinder at eleven at night on the Lonsdale retail strip. A Bay Street shop or one of the marine businesses at Sewell's Marina that will not lock behind the last person out. A multi-bay unit on the Mountain Highway corridor where the padlock on a shared yard has finally given up. None of those wait until morning, and none of them sit behind a residential call in the queue: commercial lockouts are dispatched at the same priority, at any hour.
Commercial-grade cylinders ride on the van, so a forced storefront door can usually be made lockable on the same visit instead of boarded over and left until a supplier opens. The rate for an after-hours call-out is settled on the phone the same way any other figure is. Everything that can be planned instead of rushed, master keying, access hardware, panic bars and door closers, is set out on the commercial locksmith page.
A lockout ends when the door opens. An all-keys-lost does not end until the missing keys are dead, and around here they usually go missing a long way from the door they belong to. A house key that came out of a jacket pocket on the Baden Powell, at the Quarry Rock trailhead off Panorama Drive or in one of the Lynn Headwaters lots is not one cylinder to sort out. It is every exterior door on the property, because whoever picks that ring up has no idea what it opens and neither do you. If a vehicle key was on the same ring, the car is decoded and cut where it is standing rather than towed off the mountain. Identification for the address comes first on a job like this, at any hour, because the whole point of erasing the old keys is that only the owner ends up holding a working one.
After a forced entry the urgent question is narrow: can this door be locked again before morning. A cylinder that was drilled, snapped or levered gets replaced from van stock, a strike that has been pulled out of its pocket gets reset into framing rather than into trim, and you get a straight answer about the part that cannot be finished in the dark. Ask for the police file number to be noted with the job while the technician is there, because it saves a phone call later. The frame side of this work, and what it costs, is set out on the door repair page, and the full sequence a technician works through after a break-in is on the break-in repair walkthrough.
The published windows are honest averages, and at the edges of this map the wait is a different experience from the drive. A lockout on one of the crescents off Chartwell Drive or Eyremount Drive puts you at the end of a road backing onto forested ravine with no through traffic, at an hour when nobody is going to walk past. Up Panorama Drive, once the Dollarton Highway traffic has gone for the night, it is quieter again, and the roads are tighter than the map suggests. The upper Caulfeild streets fail differently: a route that is correct for its whole length and then asks for one turn no map will help with, in the dark, at the end of the drive rather than the start of it.
The drive itself adds nothing to the figure. What the hour can add is named on the call with the rest of the price, never discovered at the door. What that geography does change is how much the first ninety seconds of the call are worth. A cross street, a gate code, a description of the driveway: on a Lonsdale side street those details tidy up the arrival, and above Taylor Way or past Deep Cove Road they decide which end of your quoted window the van actually lands on.
Usually the opposite. Every delay that slows a van on the North Shore is a daytime one: the Lonsdale corridor funnelling toward the Ironworkers Memorial and the Lions Gate approaches through the middle of the day and the evening commute, the Capilano Road and Ridgewood Drive intersection during the afternoon school pickup, the Highway 1 interchange at Mountain Highway when the Trans-Canada backs up eastbound. A three in the morning call meets none of it. The exception runs the other way at Horseshoe Bay, where the constraint is sailings rather than distance, so late evening and early morning are the clear hours there and a busy loading afternoon is not.
For most passenger vehicles, yes. Air wedges, long-reach tools and slim-jims are used according to what the vehicle is. Newer cars with soft door seals or frameless windows need a slightly different approach, and where a situation genuinely carries a risk of damage you hear the options before anything touches the car. If the car will not start rather than will not open, that is a different job and it is covered on the automotive locksmith page.
Controlled drilling is discussed and agreed before it happens, never after. Drilling destroys the cylinder, so a replacement goes on in the same visit and the cost of that hardware is part of the number you were quoted. On a heritage-style door, a thin older cottage panel or anything with original trim worth keeping, the technician works to the door rather than opening the door up to suit the hardware.
For a home: a driver's licence, a lease or a piece of addressed mail that ties you to the address. For a vehicle: registration or insurance matching your identification. For an all-keys-lost job that check happens before any programming starts, because the whole point of erasing the old keys is that only the owner ends up able to start the car. A job that does not add up gets declined, which is the protection working the way it should.
Say which one on the call, because they are two problems with two different answers. Your suite door is ours to open on your say-so. The front entrance is not ours to open at all, and being locked out at midnight does not create an authority that did not exist at noon. In practice that splits the job in half. Getting a technician past the front entrance is the part you or the building has to solve, and everything from your own doorway inward is the part we solve. It is worth raising on the call either way, because a van parked on Esplanade Avenue waiting on a lobby is burning your window, not ours.
Eleven areas in North Vancouver and six in West Vancouver, on one dispatch number. Each area page publishes the arrival window that belongs to it and the lock stock a technician expects to find there.
The same van and the same number, on the work that can wait for a booked slot instead of a call-out.
Pick-, drill- and bump-resistant cylinders with keys that can’t be copied at the hardware store. Cut, pinned and registered in-shop.
Residential Security Container (RSC) burglary classification: a key-locked security container designed to provide entry…
Car keys are priced by vehicle. Pick what you need and we’ll collect your make, model & year to text you an exact quote.