The boundary: which locks belong to the owner and which to the association
In most condominium arrangements the dividing line runs at the unit's entry door, but it does not run cleanly through it, and that is the source of nearly every dispute.
The cylinder in a unit door is normally the owner's. The door itself, the frame, and in many buildings the closer and the hinges, are frequently association property because they form part of the common structure and the fire separation. So an owner may be entitled to change the lock and not entitled to change the door, or to fit hardware that alters how the door behaves in a fire.
Common-area locks — lobby, stairwell, corridor, pool gate, mail room, trash room, storage cages, gates — are association property without exception, and no owner or tenant may have them changed on their own authority.
Before we work on anything in a condominium we ask one question: which side of that line is this lock, and who is authorising it? An owner can authorise their own cylinder. Only the association, or a manager with written delegated authority, can authorise common-area hardware. Getting that wrong creates a genuine liability for everyone involved, which is why we ask rather than assume.
Unit doors: what an owner can change and what they should not
An owner replacing or rekeying the cylinder in their own entry door is ordinary work. What causes trouble is hardware that changes the door's behaviour rather than its keying.
Adding a surface-mounted deadbolt or a chain that requires two separate actions to exit can conflict with egress requirements. Removing or defeating a door closer on a corridor-facing unit door undermines the fire compartment the corridor depends on, and in many buildings the closer is not the owner's to remove in the first place. Drilling a new through-bore for a different lock backset alters a rated door assembly.
There is also a documentation dimension. Many associations require that the management office holds a key to every unit for emergency access — a burst pipe above someone else's ceiling does not wait for an owner to fly in. Where such a requirement exists, an owner who rekeys without supplying an updated key has quietly broken the arrangement, and typically discovers this during the emergency.
The workable pattern is simple: rekey freely, tell the office, supply the key the documents require, and check with the manager before changing anything that is bolted through the door rather than into the cylinder.
Common-area keys and fobs: the part that always drifts
A building typically has a handful of common credentials: an entry key or fob, a pool gate, a mail room, a trash room, maybe a storage cage and a gate remote. Over ten years, hundreds of these are issued, and almost nobody tracks them.
The result is predictable. The pool gate key is on every keyring in three postcodes. The lobby credential works for former owners, former tenants, former cleaners and a contractor from four years ago. Then something happens and the board discovers there is no list.
Two structural improvements fix this permanently. The first is separating the credentials so that a pool key is not also a lobby key — convenience keying at a building scale means one lost item compromises everything. The second is moving high-turnover common doors from mechanical keys to credentials that can be cancelled individually, so a departing tenant's fob is deactivated in seconds rather than requiring the building to be rekeyed.
Where mechanical keys must remain, a restricted keyway with patented blanks and a signed authorisation list is the only version of key control that survives contact with a real building. An ordinary key stamped with a warning is a decoration.
Emergency access, and who holds the master
Every managed building needs a way in when something is flooding, burning or leaking into the unit below. How that access is held is a governance question rather than a hardware one, and it deserves a written answer.
The common arrangements are a managed key cabinet in the office, a key held by the management company off site, and a secured on-site box that specific parties can open. Each has a different failure mode: the cabinet is only as good as its sign-out log, the off-site key is useless at two in the morning, and the box's code is only secure while the list of people who know it is accurate.
What matters more than the choice is the discipline. Access to the store should be logged with a name, a date and a reason. Codes should be changed whenever someone who knew them leaves. And the store should be inventoried on a schedule, because the failure mode nobody plans for is discovering during an emergency that the key for unit such-and-such was never returned after a renovation in 2023.
A board that can answer “who could have got into that unit last Tuesday?” with a document rather than a shrug has already solved most of what a locksmith could otherwise be asked to fix afterwards.
Turnover: sale, new owner, new tenant
A condominium has more turnover events than a house and each one is a moment where access should be reconsidered.
On a sale, the unit cylinder should be rekeyed on the day of closing rather than at the buyer's convenience, and the office's emergency key updated at the same time. On a new tenancy, the same applies, with the additional question of which common credentials the tenant receives and how they are recovered at the end.
The recovery half is where buildings lose control. Requiring a deposit against common credentials, and actually recording their numbers on issue, turns an unenforceable request into a routine return. Numbering matters: “one fob” cannot be reconciled, whereas a specific credential identifier can be deactivated whether or not the physical item comes back.
For an owner who rents seasonally, the calculation shifts again: the unit cylinder gets rekeyed frequently, so a lock designed for repeated rekeying — and ideally an entry credential that can be reissued without a visit — pays for itself quickly.
Corridor, stairwell and gate hardware
Common-area doors work harder than any door in a private home, and they carry requirements a private door does not.
Egress comes first and it is not negotiable: from the inside, a person must be able to get out with a single motion and without a key, along the whole escape route. Any hardware, sign or improvised arrangement that defeats that is a serious problem regardless of how good the security reasoning behind it was.
Fire-rated assemblies are the second constraint. A rated door depends on its whole assembly — leaf, frame, hinges, closer, latch and any glazing — being intact and correct together. Propping such a door open, removing its closer, or fitting hardware that prevents it latching defeats the compartment it exists to create. Propped stairwell doors are the single most common version of this and are usually a symptom of a genuine inconvenience that should be solved deliberately rather than with a wedge.
Gates and pool enclosures carry their own self-closing and self-latching requirements for child safety, and those latches are exactly the hardware most damaged by salt air. A pool gate that no longer self-latches is both a compliance failure and a real hazard.
What salt air does to a beachfront building
Exposure inside a single building varies enormously, and it explains why the hardware on one elevation fails while identical hardware elsewhere looks new.
The Gulf-facing side takes the wind-driven salt aerosol directly. Higher floors on that elevation are worse, not better, because the exposure is more constant and there is less screening. Walkways and breezeways funnel the air and concentrate it. Sheltered elevations behind the building can be an order of magnitude kinder.
The consequences are consistent: cylinders on exposed corridors stiffen years earlier, gate latches seize, closer arms corrode at their pivots, and hinge screws rust into aluminium frames until they cannot be extracted without drilling.
The maintenance answer is to specify by elevation rather than by building. Marine-grade stainless fasteners and hardware on the exposed sides, dry-lubricated keyways serviced twice a year rather than never, anti-seize on every fastener going into an aluminium frame, and a fresh-water rinse of exposed hardware after storms that drive spray. It is unremarkable work and it costs a fraction of replacing the same hardware every few years.
What a board should have on record
Most of the value a locksmith adds to an association is documentation rather than hardware. This is the list worth holding.
- A schedule of every common-area lock, where it is, and what opens it.
- A key and credential register: what was issued, to whom, on what date, and whether it has been returned or deactivated.
- The keying plan — which doors are grouped together and which deliberately are not — kept somewhere other than in one person's memory.
- The emergency-access arrangement, written down: where unit keys are held, who may take one, and how each use is logged.
- A record of when each common-area cylinder was last rekeyed.
- The authorisation rule: who may instruct a locksmith on the association's behalf.
Not one piece of this is exotic and all of it is the difference between a building that can answer a question and a building that has to rekey everything to be sure.
Getting work authorised without delay
The commonest reason condominium work stalls is not cost. It is that nobody is certain who may say yes.
For unit-side work, the owner authorises, and where a tenant is in occupation we will want the owner's or manager's confirmation as well as the tenant's request. For common-area work, we need the association or a manager holding written delegated authority. A tenant, a well-meaning neighbour, or a board member acting alone outside their delegation cannot authorise changes to shared hardware.
For emergencies there should be a standing arrangement agreed in advance — a named contact, an agreed scope of what may be done without further approval, and an agreed route for after-hours instruction. Buildings that set this up once stop having the argument at two in the morning.
We are happy to work to a building's own procedures. We just need to be told what they are, once.
Service area
Navarre Condo Lock Co. covers Navarre, Navarre Beach, Holley by the Sea and Gulf Breeze, working with owners, tenants, managers and boards. Work is mobile and carried out at the building.
The line is answered around the clock and the number on this page is the number that rings. Quotes are given in full before dispatch, and for association work we are glad to quote against a written scope so it can go to a board without surprises.
Navarre Condo Lock Co. is a licensed and insured locksmith company operating in Florida.