Master Key Systems in Concord

One key in the manager pocket opens every door in the building; the key in each tenant pocket opens one unit and the laundry. Concord buildings are exactly the size at which that arrangement starts paying for itself. A fourplex on Detroit Avenue with a shared laundry and a side gate. A twelve-unit block off Monument Boulevard with a street door, a trash enclosure and a storage room. A manager carrying keys for sixty doors along the corridor for an owner who lives elsewhere. A shop on Salvio Street with an office, a stockroom and a back door onto the alley. A yard unit on Bates Avenue with a gate, a man-door beside the roll-up and a mezzanine office. The design, the pinning and a chart you can run for years without another visit are what this job consists of.

The chart is the work; the pinning is one afternoon. It starts with a walk of the building and an unhurried conversation about who genuinely needs to reach which door, and the levels fall out of that: a master for the building, sub-masters wherever a manager, a maintenance hand and a gardener each need a different reach, and a change key for every unit door. Underneath all of it sits a restricted keyway, so nobody can walk a tenant key into a mall kiosk and hand the copy to somebody who is not on the lease. Blocks along the Monument corridor went up in the same years as the houses and repeat the same few door types, which keeps a survey short and a quote accurate. Pinning happens at the van, master pins stacked over change pins, after which each cylinder goes back to its own door and is turned there with both keys before anyone calls it done. Keys carry a stamped level and a number in a log. The chart sets out which key opens which door, with blank rows waiting for the doors you add next year.

There is no list price for a system, and any published one would be dishonest, since the door count, the keyway and whether you want a restricted profile swing the total further than anything else in this trade. What arrives after the survey is a written quote with the cylinders counted door by door, the keys counted level by level, and the design charged once. The $89 service call is that survey, and it comes off the job rather than sitting beside it. Approve the quote and it holds. Later on, when a single tenant moves out, that one door is repinned at $25 to $40 per cylinder and the rest of the system carries on untouched.

You call and give the street and what the building is: how many doors, how many units, and who has to reach what. The survey gets booked, and the figure comes back afterward as a chart and an itemized quote with a line for every door and every key. On installation day the van leaves Todos Santos Plaza, and a text names the technician and gives a thirty-minute window. Each cylinder goes back into its own door and is turned there with its change key and with the master, keys are handed over against the log and signed for one at a time, and the receipt carries the figure from the quote, door by door and unit by unit.