Berkeley neighborhood · 24/7
Southside and Telegraph locksmith visits, built around the shared houses that change hands every term and the buzzer panels below campus
The blocks below campus: Telegraph Ave shops, co-ops, shared flats and houses of five or six, where keys have been circulating since long before anyone now living there signed a lease.
4.9 / 5· 457 reviews from Berkeley & the north East Bay
14 min
Avg. arrival
$89
Service call
24/7
Availability
Southside runs on an academic calendar, and so does the work here. Late August and the first half of January are when a house near Dwight Way or Channing Way replaces half its residents, and that is when the rekeys are booked. A shared house of that kind usually has a front door, a back door onto the yard, and bedroom locks added one at a time by tenants who left years ago. Rekeying is $22 to $37 per cylinder. The arrangement that works is one key for the two exterior doors, carried by everyone, and each bedroom cylinder on a key of its own. The count is taken on the call, so the figure covers the whole house instead of the first door the technician reaches.
The reason to do it at turnover is arithmetic rather than alarm. A summer sublet, a housemate who moved out in March, a copy cut on Telegraph for a partner who is no longer around: each one is a key nobody can account for, and none of them can be collected back. Repinning every cylinder retires all of them in a single visit and leaves the landlord hardware exactly as it was, which is what most leases in these blocks require. If the request has to travel through a property manager, the technician can leave a written line with the cylinder count and the figure, ready to forward. House lockouts run $109 to $189, and a fair share of them are a housemate who stepped onto the porch behind a self-locking door.
Below Bancroft Way the buildings get denser and the locks stop being only door locks. Street doors on buzzer panels that ring a phone number three tenants out of date, mailbox banks where one key has served a unit for a decade, a laundry room that everybody props open with a shoe. Those are small pieces of work added to a visit already on the block, and each gets its own line in the same agreed figure. On Telegraph Ave itself, shop doors take hundreds of cycles a day; storefront work is $139 to $435, and the recurring fault is a hookbolt that no longer reaches its keeper because the closer stopped pulling the door the last half inch. Arrival to Southside is about fourteen minutes.
Say how many cylinders the house actually has, counting bedroom doors, the back door and any shed, and whether the street entry is locked tonight, since on many of these buildings it is not and the technician can come straight up to your door.
Most requested in Southside & Telegraph
Nearby
One street over, the same van
FAQ
Asked about Southside & Telegraph
How long does a Southside address take at the start of term?+
Fourteen minutes is the ordinary run and it holds through most of the year. The two weeks when these blocks fill again, late August and mid-January, are the exception: the streets below campus are solid with vans and boxes. In those weeks the window given on the call is widened rather than the average repeated back to you.
Nobody in the house knows how many cylinders we have. Can you still price it?+
Walk the house before you call and count them: front, back, any bedroom lock a previous tenant added, the mailbox, a shed or bike room. Each cylinder is $22 to $37. The total for the whole house is worked out from your count while you are still on the call, not tallied up at the door afterwards.
The street door is on a buzzer panel that rings the wrong tenant. Is that a job?+
It is, and a small one when the technician is already at the building for a rekey. A dead entry cylinder, a panel legend three tenants out of date and a mailbox nobody has a key for are usually handled in the same visit, each on its own line inside the figure you already agreed to.
Open 24 hours, 7 days
One call, one figure, agreed before the work starts
Calls answered 24/7 across Berkeley and the north East Bay. The $89 service call, the labour and the parts are inside the number you agree to, and nothing is added to it afterwards.