Concord neighborhood · 24/7
Downtown and Todos Santos Plaza: shop doors at seven in the morning, apartments over them at midnight
The square, the four streets around it, and the shops and restaurants on Salvio and Grant with apartments on the floors above. Market stalls on Tuesday and Thursday, the BART station two blocks off, tables outside until late. The van sits at the plaza, so sixteen minutes is the shortest run on the map.
16 min
Avg. arrival
$89
Service call
24/7
Availability
Downtown is the one part of Concord where the door is not known in advance. The blocks around the square were built and rebuilt over eighty years rather than in the one push that produced the rest of the city, so a call from Salvio Street gets two or three more questions than a call from a tract street: aluminum stile door or a wood one, cylinder in the rail or a mortise in the stile, and whether the frame has been replaced since the shopfront was last redone. Storefront door locks are $149 to $435 and the count is per door, so a single narrow shop hears one figure and a corner restaurant with a second entrance hears another. A business lockout is $125 to $225. Restaurants along here keep a rear door onto the service alley with a bar on it, and $275 to $715 covers a device that has stopped holding, though a bar left dogged or a strike knocked out of line by a delivery cart gets adjusted rather than replaced.
The floors above the shops are apartments, and they behave nothing like the ground floor. One street door, a stair, a landing, and unit doors carrying hardware from three separate remodels. A lockout up there is $115 to $195, and the lock comes open intact, because it belongs to the building rather than to whoever is standing on the landing. Say on the call whether the street door still opens, since a technician who cannot reach the stair cannot reach the apartment. Between tenants a rekey is $25 to $40 per cylinder, and two apartments off one landing are quoted as a single figure with the visit already inside it. Where a manager needs the job on paper, a written line naming the address, the doors and the keys handed over goes out with the emailed receipt.
Then the cars. Market days fill the diagonal parking around the square, dinner fills the garage on Salvio, and the BART lot holds several hundred vehicles that have been standing since seven in the morning. A car lockout is $95 to $179; name the level and the row and the van pulls up beside the right vehicle instead of reading plates in the dark. A fob that has gone quiet after a long day in an open lot is usually a coin cell and nothing more, and where the fob is genuinely gone, programming a new one at the car is $89 to $179, a floor level with the $89 visit that cannot fall below it. The last calls come after the kitchens close. Calls are answered 24/7, with $40 counted inside the figure from 8pm to midnight and $75 from midnight to 7am.
Name the block of Salvio or Grant, or the nearest corner of the plaza, and say which opening it is: the shop front, the rear door on the alley, the street door to the stair, or an apartment above. On market days say which side of the square you are on, because the stalls close two of the approaches.
Most requested in Downtown & Todos Santos Plaza
Call for Downtown & Todos Santos PlazaFAQ
Asked on the way to the phone
How long from the plaza to my address?+
Twenty-three minutes is the citywide average, measured from Todos Santos Plaza. Downtown and the plaza run about 16 minutes, the Monument corridor 18, Sun Terrace and Meadow Homes 19, Bates Avenue and the yards 23, Ygnacio Valley 23, North Concord and Willow Pass 23, Dana Estates and Holbrook Heights 24, Clayton Valley and Crystyl Ranch 26. Outside the city line: Pacheco 19, Pleasant Hill 23, Walnut Creek 24, Martinez 28, Clayton 29. The hill streets and the far towns are honestly the slowest and you hear that on the call rather than standing on a porch wondering. The window that arrives by text is drawn from where the van actually is, not from the average.
Why can you price my door over the phone when nobody has seen it?+
Because of when this city was built. Concord went from 6,953 people in 1950 to 85,164 in 1970, and the houses went up in one push between 1955 and 1968, tract by tract, fitted with the same few locks. Two bore sizes, one backset, four finishes covers most of the housing stock, and a great deal of that hardware is still on the doors. Name the street and the door is largely known: what fits it, what the strike looks like, what usually fails on it. That is what turns a guess into a figure you can hear before anyone gets in the van.
So why is there a range at all?+
Three things move a job inside its range. First, which tract the door came from, because a 1957 street and a 1967 street were not built with the same hardware. Second, what has been changed on it since: an added deadbolt, a replaced cylinder, a security screen, a slider bar, a strike somebody moved. Third, which hour you are calling in. Once you have said the street, the door and the time, the figure is a single number, not a range, and it stays that number on the receipt.
Will the lock still work after you open it?+
Almost never, and never without your agreement. Picks, decoders and bypass tools cover builder deadbolts across the tracts, apartment cylinders on Monument and Detroit, aluminum storefronts on Salvio and Grant, patio sliders, most car doors and most safes, and the lock goes back to work afterward. The exceptions are a high-security cylinder, one already smashed, or one welded around a snapped blade. When that is your door you hear it plainly, you hear what would replace it, and you choose. The figure does not move either way.
What does the figure already hold, and what could move it?+
The $89 visit, the labor, whatever hardware goes on the door, and the night hour when there is one, all rolled into the number you hear. Steps up from the street in Holbrook Heights, a buzzer lobby on Monument Boulevard, a latched side gate in Crystyl Ranch, a gated yard off Port Chicago Highway: none of that moves it. The only thing that can add is extra work you decide on while the technician is standing there, such as putting the garage side door on the same key while the front is open. That gets a figure of its own, said out loud, and it starts when you say yes.
Do Saturdays, holidays or the small hours cost more?+
Saturday, Sunday and holidays cost what a Tuesday afternoon costs. Only the clock changes anything: $40 between 8pm and midnight, $75 between midnight and 7am. Both are folded in before you hear a figure, so nothing appears later. A house lockout that is $115 in daylight comes back as $155 at eleven at night and $190 at four in the morning, all of it inside the same published range, and the receipt matches what you agreed to.
I rent on the Monument corridor. Do I need my landlord before you open my own door?+
No. This corridor has the largest share of renters in the city and a tenant is the customer, not a complication. For a lockout, bring photo ID showing the address, or ID plus something on your phone that ties you to the unit: a lease page, a utility bill, a rent receipt, addressed mail. Give the building and the unit number on the call, because a buzzer panel with forty buttons is no help to a van circling Detroit Avenue. Nobody is contacted about you, and no owner has to approve putting you back into the place you pay for.
I own rentals and rekey between tenants. How does that work?+
Cylinders are counted per door at $25 to $40 each, and the whole property comes back as one figure that already holds the visit, not a visit charge with cylinders piled on top of it. A fourplex with front and back doors is eight cylinders and one number. Each unit can sit on its own key with a single management key over the set, so you carry one key instead of a ring. Old keys come back in labeled bags to check against whatever the outgoing tenant handed over, and the receipt lists every door by unit. A manager acting for an owner elsewhere can approve the work with a management agreement or a text from the owner.
Our house still has its original sixties hardware. Does all of it have to come off?+
Usually not. Streets through Sun Terrace, Meadow Homes and the Ygnacio Valley spine are full of builder knob sets and later deadbolts that still turn well and only need repinning so keys from three owners ago stop working. Three things genuinely earn replacing: a cylinder with real wear in it, a bolt whose throw no longer reaches the frame, and a strike screwed into trim instead of the stud behind, which is the single detail that decides whether a door survives a kick. Which of the three applies to yours gets said before anything is unscrewed.
Do you work the yards on the east side, and the lots around the mall and BART?+
Both. Man-doors beside roll-ups on Bates Avenue, warehouse offices off Solano Way and Port Chicago Highway, yard gates along the Port Chicago side, storefronts and restaurant back doors around the plaza on Salvio and Grant. Early starts are normal there, because a shop that cannot open at seven loses a shift rather than a morning. On the car side, a good share of the work sits in the Sun Valley Mall lots, the Concord and North Concord park-and-ride rows, the Diablo Valley College lots and the Willows. Name the lot and give a row, a level or the color of the car. A gated garage needs somebody who can get the van through the gate. None of it changes the figure.
24/7 — nights, weekends & holidays
Give the street, hear the figure, and the door gets opened the way it was built to be opened
Concord, Pleasant Hill, Pacheco, Clayton, Martinez and Walnut Creek, 24/7, holidays included. Say what the door is doing and one figure comes back with the $89 visit already inside it and the hour already counted. The lock is opened without damage wherever it can be, and the receipt shows what the call showed, whether the deed is in your name or the lease is.