Letting a property changes who can get into it several times a decade instead of twice a lifetime. Almost every difficulty landlords have with locks comes from that one fact, and almost all of it is preventable at handover. Nobody dealing with key control on a let property at eleven at night should be reading this; the locksmith near me page exists for that hour.
Every lease change is a full lock reset. Here's the professional approach.
Between tenants
Change or rekey every external cylinder. Always.
Registered keys
Stops tenants making unauthorised copies during the lease.
Complex remotes
Cancel and reissue at handover.
The arithmetic of a let property
Consider how differently the two kinds of property behave. Somewhere a family has lived for years may have handed out keys three or four times in total. A rented house does it at the end of every lease, so by the fourth tenant a single cylinder has served four unconnected households in succession, with nothing passing between them except metal and goodwill.
None of which implies anything about tenants, who almost always return precisely what they were issued and give the property no further thought. The difficulty is structural: returned metal proves only that metal was returned, and no document anywhere records what else was made from it. The figure is therefore not merely unrecorded but genuinely unavailable.
That is why a changeover reset is the one habit worth building into letting. Treated as part of turning a property around — alongside the clean and the touch-up paint — it is a modest cost on a day the place is empty anyway, and it means the answer to how many keys exist is always a figure the owner set. Skipped, it compounds invisibly until a new tenant asks and the landlord finds there is nothing to say.
What to do at every changeover
Change the cylinders on whatever can be reached from outside, hand over a counted set, and record the count on the lease itself. One visit does all of it. Recording it is the part people skip and the part that carries the arrangement forward, because it is what lets the next changeover start from a fact rather than a recollection.
Count whatever opens the boundary too. Gate keys travel further than house keys because they feel less consequential, and nobody hesitates before having one cut. Where the gate runs on a motor, the remotes belong in the same tally — a remote opens the one thing the whole property leans on and is passed over at handover with barely a sentence. Every locksmith in Randburg who works locally rather than passing through knows key control on a let property well.
The changeover is also the cheapest moment for anything mechanical, because the property is empty and nothing has to be arranged around anybody. A door that has been sticking, a gate that has gone stiff, a mechanism a tenant mentioned once — deal with all of it in the same visit as the reset. It is a fraction of what the same work costs as separate call-outs later.
Who may authorise what, and when
The single most common failure in a let property is not mechanical. It is that a door stops working at nine on a Sunday evening, the agency is closed, the tenant does not know whether they are allowed to have anything done, and nobody can reach the owner. That situation is entirely avoidable and it is avoided at the start of the lease rather than during it.
Settle three things at handover: who authorises work outside office hours, a name and number the tenant may actually use, and what the tenant is permitted to arrange on their own initiative if the property cannot be secured. Five minutes of conversation removes the whole problem, and without it everybody improvises at exactly the moment improvising is least welcome.
It is worth being generous about the last of those. A tenant who cannot secure the property should be able to act, because the alternative is a property left insecure overnight to preserve a procedural point. Most leases already allow it; what is missing is that nobody has said so plainly, so the tenant does not know. For a different angle on this, the piece on the first week in a new home is worth a few minutes.
Wear is not damage, and saying so pays
Tenants routinely do not report a door that has started needing a knack, because they are worried it will be treated as something they broke and charged for. So it goes unmentioned for a year and then fails outright, usually at an inconvenient hour, and costs the owner considerably more than it would have as a booked visit.
Saying plainly at the start of a tenancy that mechanical wear is expected and should be reported early is one of those small things with a disproportionate return. It costs nothing, it changes the tenant's incentive completely, and it converts a category of emergency call-outs into scheduled lock repair work at a fraction of the price.
The same applies to gates, which tenants report even less often because the house still works. A gate that has been stiff for two seasons is on exactly the same path as a front door, and on a let property nobody is walking round noticing it. A tenant who has been told it is worth mentioning will mention it.
Shared and sectional-title complications
If the property is a unit in a complex, the line is clean and worth explaining to the tenant on day one. The unit door and everything inside it is the owner's; the complex entrance, shared gates and communal areas belong to the scheme and need a trustee or the managing agent to instruct. A tenant who knows that does not spend an evening ringing the wrong people.
If the property is a house on a stand that also has a flatlet or an outbuilding let separately, the arrangement needs designing rather than assuming. Each household should hold exactly what it needs to reach its own door and nothing beyond it, and the two should not share a key simply because both fittings came from the same box years ago.
Where the only route to a second dwelling runs past the main house, a modest side gate dividing the front of the stand from the back is worth more than an expensive lock on anything. It changes nobody's access, costs little, and turns a shared path into two private ones — which is what both households usually wanted and neither had raised. If this is the part you are stuck on, when to upgrade a gate lock takes it further.
The handover pack
Give a tenant, in writing, the things they will otherwise ring about at an awkward hour. How many keys they have been issued and for what. Which door is the way out and where its key lives. How the gate works and where the manual release is if it is motorised. Who to contact after hours and what they may authorise themselves.
That is one page and it prevents a surprising share of the calls a landlord fields in the first month. It is also the document that makes the next changeover easy, because the next tenant gets the same page with the numbers updated rather than a set of arrangements reconstructed from memory.
Keep a copy with the lease rather than only with the tenant. On a property let four times, that file is the only continuous record of what exists, what was changed and when — and it is the thing that lets an owner answer a question in thirty seconds that would otherwise require a visit and a locksmith.
The short version for landlords
Reset at every changeover as routine, count the gate and the remotes, and write the number down with the lease. Settle after-hours authority at handover. Tell tenants that wear is expected and should be reported early. Deal with mechanical work while the property is empty. Give a one-page handover covering keys, exits and who to call. The article on child-proofing your locks covers neighbouring ground in more detail than there is room for here.
None of that is expensive and all of it is preventive. The failures it avoids — a property relying on an unknown number of keys, a tenant sleeping behind a door that will not fasten, a stiff mechanism that became a midnight lock change — are the ones that actually cost money in letting, and they are entirely predictable.
It also makes the property easier to let. A tenant who is handed a page explaining what they have, how to get out and who to ring is being told, without anybody saying it, that the property is properly managed. That is worth something in a market where a good tenant has a choice, and it costs an hour once.
Why the empty week is worth planning around
The gap between tenancies is the cheapest and least disruptive moment in the entire cycle, and most landlords let it pass. The property is empty, nothing has to be arranged around anybody, and several jobs can be done in a single visit: the cylinders reset, the sticking door corrected, the gate serviced and the key count written down against the lease.
Doing the same items during a tenancy costs more and inconveniences somebody every time, and doing them after a failure costs more still. A landlord who books one visit into every changeover week is buying the same work at the lowest price it will ever be offered at, and getting a property that comes back into use with everything working.
It also produces the document that makes the next changeover easy. How many keys exist, who holds them, and what was done and when — kept with the lease rather than in somebody's memory. On a property let four times that file is the only continuous record, and it is what lets an owner answer a tenant's question in thirty seconds rather than with a lock change and a guess.