It\u2019s quite common for managers of apartment buildings and condominiums to keep copies of all the unit keys on site. This is useful if a resident gets locked out or if there\u2019s an emergency maintenance issue like a gas leak or a burst pipe when no one is home. Last week there was a break-in at the office of a large condominium complex in Sammamish and the keys to hundreds of units were stolen. The property managers hired a large locksmith company to resolve the problem, but they couldn\u2019t come out for a week. Meanwhile, some thief had keys to all the residents\u2019 apartments. I\u2019ve been pretty busy rekeying locks for many of the folks who didn\u2019t want to wait for the locksmith hired by the management company.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t the first time I\u2019ve seen something like this. Once I did a bunch of work for a maid service company that had all its keys stolen and subsequently had to take responsibility for securing all of its clients\u2019 houses. Another time a client who is a residential property manager had his laptop and a bunch of keys stolen from his home office. The keys were not labeled with their addresses but there was enough information in the laptop to figure out what address each key went to. We thought we were being overly cautious when we treated this like a five-alarm emergency, contacting all the tenants to quickly rekey their houses. But the one couple who was sluggish about scheduling with me saw their home burglarized.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve been entrusted to keep a lot of people\u2019s keys, how do you store them? Are they in a proper safe or are they in a flimsy steel lockbox that can be pried open with ease? Are they labeled with the bare unit numbers are do you have a coding system that\u2019s not easily decipherable? If all of the keys were stolen, how quickly could you secure all those homes, and what would it cost? Do you already have a plan in place? If these questions make you uncomfortable, it might mean that you need to get your house in order. And if the place that you live keeps a copy of the key to your home, you would not be unreasonable to ask some of these questions.<\/p>\n
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