The keys you were handed at transfer are not a set. They are whatever survived from every previous owner, tenant, contractor and helper the property has ever had. Here is what to do about that in the first week, in the order that actually matters. If the first week after a transfer is what brought you here but the problem is happening right now, the locksmith near me page is the one to read instead.
You have no idea how many copies of your new front-door key are floating around. Previous owners, cleaners, tradespeople, estate agents — the list is long. Here's what to do the day you move in.
Change every external lock
Front door, back door, patio door, garage side-door, security gate. Non-negotiable.
Rekey or replace padlocks
Boundary gates, garden sheds, tool rooms — all of them.
Audit remotes
Get new gate remotes coded and cancel the old ones with the estate or complex management.
Test every alarm zone
Trigger each sensor deliberately so you know they work before you actually need them.
Book a security walk-through
A locksmith or security consultant can spot weak windows, dropped doors and poor gate hardware in 20 minutes.
Why the key count is unknowable, not just unknown
No private house in South Africa keeps a register of its keys. There is no document, no obligation and nobody whose job it would be. So when a property changes hands, what gets handed over is not the set of keys that exist — it is the set of keys that happened to be in a drawer on the day. Everything else is still out there, and nobody involved in the sale is being dishonest about it, because nobody involved actually knows. There is a separate article on safety for people who work in your home if that is closer to the problem in front of you.
Think about who has legitimately held a key to your new house over the last decade. A previous owner and their partner. A tenant, or three. A cleaner. A gardener. A neighbour holding a spare. A builder during a renovation. Somebody's adult child who moved out. Each of those was a perfectly sensible arrangement at the time and each one has a plausible copy attached to it.
That is the entire argument for resetting the cylinders in the first week. Not suspicion of the seller, who is almost certainly as much in the dark as you are, but the simple business of converting an unknown into a number you chose. It is quick, it is inexpensive, and it is the one thing in the whole transaction that nobody else — not the agent, not the attorney, not the seller — has any duty to do for you.
Which openings actually need doing
Not all of them, and anybody who says otherwise is quoting rather than advising. What matters is every opening somebody could genuinely reach from outside without climbing. That means the front door, the back door, any side or garage entrance, a patio slider that opens onto ground level, and the boundary gates. On most Randburg properties that is a shorter list than the household expects. The first week after a transfer is part of the ordinary week for a locksmith in Randburg working the same streets repeatedly.
What generally does not need doing is upstairs windows with nothing beneath them, internal doors, and anything in a position where a person could not stand without visibly climbing something. There is an exception worth checking in the double-storey suburbs: an upstairs window above a garage roof or a carport is not an upstairs window in any practical sense, and it should be counted with the ground floor.
The way to settle the list is to walk the outside of the property once, in daylight, counting openings in the order somebody arriving would meet them. Ten minutes of that beats an hour of discussion indoors. On extended older houses it routinely turns up a door or two that nobody mentioned during the viewing, which is normal rather than sinister — the previous household had stopped thinking of them as doors years ago.
Gates, remotes and the things that are not keys
A gate remote is a key that nobody treats as one. It opens the boundary the whole property depends on, it gives no sign of having been copied or kept, and it typically lives clipped to a sun visor. When a property changes hands, remotes are handed over in exactly the same casual way as keys — which is to say, the ones that happen to be in the house.
So count them, and decide whether that number is the number you want. If the property is in a complex or an estate, the remotes and access tags are usually the body corporate's or the estate's to reissue and cancel rather than a locksmith's, and that is a call to the managing agent or the control room. It is worth making in the first week rather than the first year. What holds here does not always hold in Randburg CBD, which is why locksmith work in Randburg CBD has its own write-up.
Padlocks belong in the same conversation and are almost always forgotten. A boundary gate, a garden store, a pool room, a meter box, a pump housing — each has a key somewhere, and on a property that has changed hands twice nobody can say where. Replacing a handful of padlocks costs very little and takes them off the list of things nobody has thought about.
What to check before you need it
Work every mechanism on the property once, deliberately, with the door open. Anything that is stiff, sticky, or needs a particular knack is telling you it is deteriorating, and you have just inherited it from a household that had learned to live with it. Dealt with in the first month as a booked lock repair it is a small job. Dealt with in month eight, it will be at eleven at night.
Find the manual release on any motorised gate and work it once, in daylight, calmly, with somebody else watching so two people know where it is. The alternative is discovering it during a power failure, in the rain, with a car half in the road. This takes five minutes, costs nothing, and is the single most reliably useful thing on this list after the cylinders.
Then look at the property after dark from a car, from the direction traffic approaches. Is the number legible? Is the entrance obvious? On a corner stand, which road would somebody actually arrive on? That matters on any night you need somebody quickly, and it is the sort of thing nobody ever checks until the evening it counts.
If the house has a second dwelling or a tenant
A great many older Randburg stands carry a converted outbuilding at the back, and if yours is let — or you intend to let it — the reasoning changes. A stand built for one household has one boundary, one gate and one group of people meant to hold a key. Two unrelated households on the same ground means every one of those assumptions quietly stops being true.
The practical answer is that each household should hold exactly what it needs to reach its own door and nothing beyond it. That usually means the gate and their own entrance, and it explicitly means the flatlet key should not also open the main house — which on older properties it sometimes does, because both fittings came from the same box decades ago. Ferndale is on the same run, and the account of locksmith work in Ferndale sets out what differs there.
Where the only route to the back runs past your kitchen door and garage, a modest side gate dividing the front of the stand from the back is worth more than an expensive lock on anything. It costs little, it changes nothing about anybody's access, and it turns a shared path into two private ones. Suburbs like Fairland are full of stands where that single change settles the whole question.
The order to do it in
First, the cylinders on every reachable opening. That is the item with a deadline attached, because until it is done the property is relying on a number nobody chose. It is also the cheapest thing on the list relative to what it settles, and it can generally be done in a single morning as one lock change rather than as several separate visits.
Second, the things that are not keys: gate remotes counted, estate or complex tags reissued through the managing agent, padlocks on stores and boundary gates replaced. Third, anything mechanical that has started misbehaving, before it finishes. Fourth, the free items — the manual release, the walk round the outside, the look at your own gate after dark.
What is not on the list is a package of upgrades bought in the first month on the strength of a quote written before anybody looked at your particular street. A property on a short, closely overlooked road needs something quite different from one backing onto open ground, and both need something different from a stepped plot on a hill. Get the four items above done, then decide the rest with the house in front of you.
What can wait, and what genuinely cannot
The reset has a deadline attached because until it is done the property depends on a number nobody chose. Everything else on this page is cheap, quick and can comfortably wait a few weeks. That distinction is worth holding on to, because the first month of owning a house produces a great deal of advice and most of it is less urgent than the person giving it suggests.
What can wait indefinitely is a package of upgrades bought on the strength of a quote written before anybody looked at your particular street. A property on a short, closely overlooked road needs something quite different from one backing onto open ground, and both need something different again from a stepped plot on a hill. The suburb pages on this site set out which of those you are on.
What should not wait is anything mechanical that has already started misbehaving. You have inherited it from a household that learned to live with it, and the technique they developed is the compensation for a fault that has been progressing for a while. Dealt with in the first month it is a small lock repair; dealt with in month eight it is a call-out at eleven at night.