Locked out in Melbourne? Do these five things first

1. If a person or a pet is shut in a car, call 000 now

This is the only part of this page that is urgent. A parked car on a warm Melbourne day becomes dangerous within minutes, not hours. Emergency services will open that door immediately and at no cost to you. Do not wait for a locksmith, do not wait for a tow truck, and do not spend ten minutes ringing around for quotes. Ring 000, then sort the replacement key afterwards.

2. Walk the whole property before you accept you are locked out

It sounds obvious and it works often enough to be worth the ninety seconds. Back door, laundry door, garage personnel door, the window above the kitchen sink that never latches properly. In older Melbourne housing stock — the interwar flats through St Kilda and Elwood, the terraces in Albert Park and Prahran — there is very often a second way in that nobody thinks about because nobody uses it.

Do not break a window. A pane of glass in a period house costs considerably more than a locksmith, and a forced window is a security problem you then have to fix.

3. Find out who else already has a key

A housemate at work. A partner twenty minutes away. A parent with the spare in a kitchen drawer. If you rent, the managing agent almost certainly holds a key and will often release it during business hours with ID. If you are in an apartment building, the building manager may have access to your door or be able to let you into common areas.

Twenty minutes of waiting is cheaper than any call-out, and considerably cheaper than an after-hours one.

4. Work out exactly what you are locked out of

This matters more than people expect, because it changes the price and the tools. Before you ring, know:

• House, car or business. Three different jobs.
• What kind of door and lock. A deadlatch, a mortice lock, a screen door, an aluminium shopfront, a sliding door.
• Whether the key exists. Lost forever, or sitting on the bench inside? A key that exists somewhere is a different job from one that has to be cut from scratch.
• For a car: make, model and year. And whether any working key still exists anywhere.
• Whether anyone is inside. Say so immediately — it changes the priority.

5. Ask three questions before you agree to anything

Emergency locksmithing attracts a specific kind of operator: a national-sounding number, a suspiciously low quote to secure the booking, and a much larger invoice once someone is at your door and you are standing in the cold. It is a well-documented problem and Melbourne is not exempt. Three questions filter most of it out, whoever you ring:

• “What is the total, including call-out and GST?” Not the call-out fee. The total.
• “Are you the person who is attending?” Lead-generation operations sell your job on to whoever is nearest and add a margin. You want the tradesperson, not the middleman.
• “What is your ABN?” A legitimate operator answers this without hesitating.

An operator who will not answer those on the phone has told you something useful.

What happens when a locksmith arrives

You should be asked for identification, and for something that links you to the address or the vehicle — a lease, a bill, a rates notice, registration papers. This is not bureaucracy. It is the single thing standing between a locksmith and being used to break into somebody else’s property. A locksmith who does not ask is a locksmith to be wary of.

After that, the lock gets assessed and you get a firm price before any tool comes out. Non-destructive methods — picking, bypassing, proper opening tools — come first and work on the large majority of jobs. Drilling is a last resort for locks that genuinely leave no other route, and some high-security cylinders are built precisely to resist opening. If a lock has to be sacrificed, you should find that out and agree the cost before it happens, not afterwards.

Afterwards: the bit everyone skips

If the key is genuinely lost rather than sitting inside, somebody may now be walking around with a key to your home. Rekeying the cylinder makes every old key useless and costs a fraction of new hardware. It is the obvious next step and it is the one most people put off until they forget about it entirely.

And if this was a car: get a spare cut. A spare made while you still have a working key costs a small fraction of an all-keys-lost job, where the key has to be originated from the vehicle and the immobiliser reprogrammed.