Master Key Systems in San Leandro

One key in the manager pocket opens every door in the building; the key in each tenant pocket opens one unit and the laundry. That is a master key system, and San Leandro buildings are exactly the size where it pays for itself. A fourplex off Bancroft with a shared laundry and a side gate. A twelve-unit block on East 14th with a buzzer door, a trash enclosure and a storage room. A manager holding keys for sixty doors across the city for an owner who lives elsewhere. A shop on Washington Avenue with an office, a stockroom and a back door. A works unit on Davis Street with a yard gate, a man-door beside the roll-up and a mezzanine office. Estudillo Security designs the system, pins every cylinder and hands over a chart you can run for years without another visit.

The drawing is the real work; the pinning is an afternoon. After a walk of the building and a plain conversation about who needs which door, the levels get sketched: a master for the building, sub-masters where a manager, a maintenance hand and a gardener each need a different reach, and a change key for every unit door. Underneath it all sits a restricted keyway, so a tenant cannot have a copy cut at a kiosk and hand it to somebody who is not on the lease. Cylinders are pinned at the van with the master pins stacked above the change pins, then carried back and tried in their own doors, twice. Original mortise cylinders in older buildings are pinned into the system and kept rather than replaced. Every key is stamped with its level and logged by number, and the chart lists each door against each key that opens it, with empty rows for the doors you add next year.

A master key system is quoted rather than listed, because door count, keyway and the choice of restricted key move the number further than anything else could. What you get instead is an itemized quote after the survey: cylinders counted by door, keys counted by level, and the design once. The $89 service call is the survey and it counts toward the job. Once you approve the quote it holds. A single door repinned later, when one tenant moves out, is $26 to $42 per cylinder and nothing else in the system changes.

You call and say what happened and where, or what you are planning: how many doors, how many units, what kind of building. The survey is booked, and the figure comes back after it as a chart and an itemized quote with the unit it is counted in beside every line, per door and per key. On installation day the van leaves Davis Street, and a text names the technician and gives a thirty-minute window. Each cylinder goes back into its own door and is tried there with its change key and with the master, keys are handed over against the log and signed for, and the receipt shows the figure from the quote, door by door and unit by unit.