Locksmith for residents’ associations

A residents’ association (comunidad de propietarios) has a lot of doors and a lot of people using them: the main entrance, the pedestrian garage door, the storerooms, the meter room, the pool or the bin store. When one of those locks fails, it is not one resident’s problem, it is everyone’s. On the coastal urbanisations, with homes shut for half the year and full in summer, communal locks work hard and also suffer from the sun and the salty air.

What an association usually needs

• The lock on the main entrance has gone stiff, the latch will not engage or the door will not close by itself.
• Keys to communal areas have been lost and nobody knows who has them.
• Many residents need access to the pool or the storerooms without handing each of them a whole bunch of keys.
• Someone has forced the pedestrian garage door or a storeroom door.
• There is an empty flat in the building and the residents fear squatters will move in.

Services we often carry out for associations

Master keying is what brings most order to an association. Each resident opens their own home or storeroom with their key, and that same key also opens the main entrance, the pool or the garage. The caretaker or the property manager can hold a master key for the communal areas. No more key rings with ten keys on them.

With lock maintenance, the locks on communal areas are checked and greased before they fail, and anything about to break is replaced. With constant use and the sea air, a timely check causes far fewer headaches than a breakdown in the middle of August.

If the main entrance door slams when it closes or stays open, door closer installation or adjusting the one you already have usually solves it. When a resident has no key to the garage or the storeroom, we carry out the garage and storeroom opening, and if the garage remote can be copied we duplicate it too.

What we do not do: we do not install access control, video entry systems or electric door releases, and we do not install or repair garage doors.

How we organise the work

Before we start, we give the association a fixed quote setting out what we will do and what we will fit. We give it to you in writing, so it can be approved at the general meeting or reviewed by the property manager. If something turns up on site that changes the job, we tell you and do not carry on without agreement.

The invoice is made out in the name of the residents’ association, with its tax details, so the property manager can enter it in the accounts without any trouble. Payment can be by card, Bizum or cash.

The practical approach is for the president, the property manager or the caretaker to send us photos of the doors and locks on WhatsApp, along with the address of the building and what needs doing. With that we prepare the quote and arrange the visit.

A tip for the general meeting

Before changing the locks on communal areas, draw up a list of the doors there are and who should be able to open each one. If you are going to master key, it is best to plan it in one go with all the doors, because adding locks to the system later means reviewing it. And keep the master key somewhere controlled, never hanging up in the meter room.

We look after residents’ associations in Torrevieja and throughout the Vega Baja, 24 hours a day, every day.