The honest answer is not a number of seconds. It is that a lock buys time, and how much time it buys depends far more on where it is than on what it costs. Here is what actually decides it.
A generic budget cylinder can be defeated in under a minute by a moderately skilled attacker. Here's how to change that.
Fit high-security cylinders
Anti-snap and anti-bump features change the math dramatically.
Layer your security
Gate, then front door, then internal doors — attackers hate layers.
Fix dropped doors
A door that binds gives an attacker something to lever against.
Time is the only thing any lock sells
No lock is unopenable and no reputable locksmith will tell you otherwise. What a lock does is impose a cost in time, noise and effort, and the whole of practical security is about whether that cost is higher than the situation allows. A mechanism that would take twenty minutes to defeat is an excellent lock on a busy pavement and a mediocre one at the bottom of a garden nobody overlooks. A search for a locksmith near me and an interest in how much time an opening actually gives somebody land in the same place: the same round, the same number.
Which means the question people usually ask — how long would it take to open this lock — has no useful answer on its own. The useful version is: how long could somebody work at this particular opening, on this particular property, without being interrupted or noticed? That is a question about position, sightlines and habits, and it is answerable in about ten minutes with a walk round the outside. There is a separate article on how to tell if a lock needs replacing if that is closer to the problem in front of you.
This is also why two identical houses on the same street can have genuinely different exposure. One has a side passage visible from two neighbours' kitchens; the other has a hedge that grew over four years ago. Same door, same lock, entirely different amounts of available time — and only one of them has a problem worth spending money on.
What actually gets attacked, and how
Picking is what films are about and it is not what happens. It is slow, it requires genuine skill, and there are faster options available to anybody who has decided to get in. Treating pick resistance as the headline property of a lock is a marketing decision rather than a practical one, though it does matter on certain commercial and high-value applications.
Snapping is the realistic attack on a great many domestic cylinders and it is fast, quiet and requires very little skill. Where a cylinder stands out past the surrounding furniture, there is something to take hold of — and once it is held, it goes. This is why the most useful free check on your own front door is whether the cylinder sits flush — and why anti-snap design matters more than most of the other claims. For a locksmith in Randburg, how much time an opening actually gives somebody is simply what a good share of the calls turn out to be.
Beyond that, force is the usual answer: the frame, the hinges, the keeper, the glazing, or simply an opening that was not locked. In a good proportion of the properties we attend after an incident, the mechanism was never the point of failure at all. Something around it was, or something was open, and the lock is simply the part everybody looks at afterwards.
The four things that give somebody time
Being out of sight. An opening that cannot be seen from a window, from the street, or from a neighbouring property offers unlimited time regardless of what is fitted to it. On extended older houses this is frequently a side or rear door that the household stopped noticing years ago; on stepped properties it is often a boundary below the fall of the ground.
Being unlit. Darkness is not just about visibility to a passer-by; it changes whether anybody looking would register something as out of place. A working light on the approach costs very little and it removes a genuine advantage. This is one of the few security purchases that is almost always worth its price. The same crew handles lock change work across the round, and that page sets out what it involves.
Being unoccupied — a property empty for a fortnight offers a completely different amount of time from one where somebody might come home at any moment. And being on a route where a stranger is unremarkable: a footpath at the bottom of a garden, a lane, a service road. All four of those are about position rather than hardware, and all four can be assessed for nothing.
What to do about it, in order
Walk the outside of your property and count the openings honestly, in the order somebody arriving would meet them. At each one ask the two questions that matter: could somebody reach this without climbing, and could they stand here for a while without being seen? Two noes and that opening is already fine as it stands. Two yeses and you have found where the budget goes, regardless of what anybody in the house assumed.
Then deal with sightlines before hardware. Planting that has grown over a side passage, a bin store that blocks a view, a light that has not worked since last winter — those give away time for free and cost almost nothing to correct. It is common for a proper walk to produce a list where the first three items involve no locksmith at all.
Only then consider the fittings, and only on the openings the walk identified. That is usually two or three rather than a house full, and it frequently means a correctly sized cylinder and a keeper fixed into something solid rather than a premium product. Where a genuine upgrade is warranted it is ordinary residential locksmith work and a much smaller job than most people expect.
Why the doors nobody counts are the ones that matter
Households under-count their own openings with remarkable consistency, and always in good faith. A door that has had a bookshelf in front of it for a decade has genuinely stopped being a door in the household's mind. A garage side entrance connecting internally to the house is thought of as part of the garage. A store that leads onward into the yard is a store. The same crew handles safe locksmith work across the round, and that page sets out what it involves.
Every one of those is an opening in exactly the way the front door is, and each is typically wearing whatever the builder fitted twenty years ago, in a position nobody looks at. That combination — weak fitting, no sightline, no attention — is the practical definition of the easy way in, and it is present on a large share of the properties we walk.
Which is why the walk is the whole exercise. It is free, it takes ten minutes, and on extended older properties in suburbs like Blackheath it routinely produces a count two or three higher than the one the owner gave on the phone. Nothing about hardware helps until that list is right.
What genuinely does not help
Buying a premium lock for a door with a soft frame or dropped hinges. The cylinder was never the weak point and the assembly is unchanged. This is the commonest way money gets spent to no effect, and it is avoidable with thirty seconds of looking at how the door sits in its opening.
Fitting everything on offer after an incident, in the week when nobody is thinking clearly. Households in that position buy from fear rather than assessment, and the result is frequently an expensive set of measures that does not address the opening that was actually used — which nobody has established, because nobody asked.
And relying on a boundary that is not one. A fence marks a line; everybody involved understands that. A wall that is head height in your garden may be a knee-high step from the terrace above it. Money spent on a boundary that cannot do the job is money that was not spent on the buildings, where it would have done measurable work. If a lock repair visit is closer to what you need, there is a full page on how that side runs.
The realistic position for most Randburg homes
On a short, closely overlooked street with people passing and neighbours who would notice a strange vehicle, the available time is genuinely limited and the honest recommendation is usually modest: a correctly fitted cylinder on the two or three reachable openings, a key count somebody has chosen, and anything mechanical dealt with before it fails.
On a property with a rear boundary onto a public footpath, a plot where the buildings are well away from the road, a house that stands empty for weeks, or one on a slope where a gate sits below every window — the calculation changes, because time is available. Those are the properties where a genuine upgrade earns its price.
The reason this page does not give you a number of seconds is that the number would be misleading. What decides your exposure is not a specification on a box; it is the ten-minute walk nobody has taken. Do that first, and whatever you spend afterwards will be spent in the right place — which is the whole of the advice.
Turning this into a short list for your own property
Walk the outside and count the openings in the order somebody arriving would meet them, then ask the two questions at each: could this be reached without climbing, and could somebody stand here a while without being seen? Two noes and that opening is already fine. Two yeses and you have found where the budget belongs, whatever anybody in the house assumed.
Deal with sightlines before hardware, because they are free and they act on the only variable that matters. Planting grown over a side passage, a bin store blocking a view from the kitchen, a light that has not worked since last winter — each of those hands somebody unhurried privacy at no cost to them. It is common for the first three items on an honest list to involve no locksmith at all.
Then fit the two or three openings the walk identified, and stop. On most Randburg properties that means a correctly sized cylinder and a keeper fixed into something solid rather than a premium product, and it is ordinary residential locksmith work. The households that end up spending the most are almost always the ones who bought before they walked.