Royal Ascot locksmith — where most owners have never slept in the unit.

Not first, no — we can let you back into the unit you rent as soon as your occupancy checks out, and a lease on your phone, a municipal bill or your surname beside the unit on the intercom board will each do it. Altering or rekeying anything is a different matter: that is the owner's property and it takes the owner's authority. The distinction is there for your protection as much as theirs.

It depends on your mandate, and we will ask rather than assume. Arranging access, attending to a repair and carrying out an agreed rekey are usually within an agency's remit. Anything that changes the owner's hardware or issues new keys needs authority that traces back to the owner, and having that established in advance for your managed units saves a great deal of time.

At every changeover, and as a scheduled part of the turnaround rather than a decision taken each time. Over a lease keys get copied for partners, housemates and cleaners, and what comes back proves nothing about how many exist. Booked in alongside the cleaning it is a small, predictable cost; left as a judgement call it gets skipped.

It is a key cut on a controlled profile, so copies cannot be produced at an ordinary counter and can only be issued on the owner's or agent's authority. For a unit that lets repeatedly that is exactly the right tool: nothing changes for the tenant living there, and the number of keys in existence stays a known figure across successive tenancies instead of drifting upward.

Yes, and it removes the bag of unlabelled keys that most owners and agents end up carrying. Properly planned, one key in your pocket covers the entire portfolio, and the key each tenant carries fits nothing beyond their own entrance. Inspections stop involving trial and error, and an emergency at one unit no longer begins with a search through a bunch.

Because most owners are not here to notice it. In a scheme with a high proportion of let units, a tenant reports a problem to an agent, the agent reports it to an owner, and the owner body has to reach a decision — with most of its members living somewhere else. It is a structural delay rather than indifference. What helps is a written report that can be tabled rather than a description passed along.

Meaningfully, and they rarely get treated differently. A unit on a development's perimeter or at ground level can be approached with far less chance of being seen than one in the interior of a scheme, and the developer fitted the same hardware everywhere. For an owner with a ground-floor unit that is the one place where spending above the scheme standard genuinely pays.

We ask what the complex is called, not just the number, since the numbering inside these places bears no relation to the road outside. Where a boom or a guardhouse is involved, we get that sign-off moving the moment you ring instead of leaving somebody idling at a barrier. In a suburb packed this tightly, those two pieces of information beat any street address.