Strand locksmith — half these flats belong to somebody who is not here.

Not on a schedule — at the moments that actually mean something. A tenancy ending, a change of agent, a contractor relationship going sour, or simply reaching the point where you can no longer list everyone who has held a set. Changing at those moments costs very little and resets an unknown number to a known one. Changing on a calendar mostly wastes money.

They can instruct the work by phone, but entitlement still has to be established before a door is opened, and that is not something we bend on. In a town where a great many owners live elsewhere, taking somebody's word for it would make us the easiest way into half the beachfront. It occasionally makes a job slower than a caller would like, and we would rather be slower than careless.

The common-area doors almost always belong to the body corporate, which means a trustee or the managing agent instructs work on them, not an individual owner. Your own unit door is yours. It is worth being clear about which side of that line a problem sits on before booking, because it determines who can authorise the job and who receives the invoice.

Yes, and honestly it is among the more rewarding work we get. Blocks of this age typically accumulate keys across decades and successive committees until nobody can say what opens what. A designed hierarchy replaces that sprawl with a small controlled set, so a caretaker or contractor change becomes an administrative act instead of a building-wide rebuild.

Not usually from force, no. What upper-floor flats are genuinely exposed to is people who once had legitimate access and still hold a key — and a heavier lock does absolutely nothing about that. Ground-floor units and the doors between parking and the stairwell are the parts of a block where physical strength does matter, and that is where we would spend the money.

Arrange a short check before you travel rather than after you arrive. A mechanism that goes unworked for eight months stiffens up, and the key that turned perfectly in March will jam halfway in December — usually at night, after a long drive, with everybody in the car exhausted. It is entirely recoverable either way, but it is far better dealt with in daylight.

Yes, and that is exactly when it should happen. A handover date rarely moves, so the change gets timed to it rather than fitted in whenever convenient. It is a short job on a standard door, and doing it on the day removes the awkward gap where the outgoing tenant's keys still work and the incoming one has already been given a set.

Yes. Behind the blocks Strand is a fairly ordinary town of freestanding houses and small businesses, with none of the multi-occupancy complications of the seafront. That work looks like normal domestic locksmithing — worn mechanisms, gates, garage side doors and the occasional lockout — and it is a steady part of what the Helderberg round covers.