Blacktown House being burgled, Locksmith rekeying required

I got a call from a young mother in Blacktown this week who thought she might be getting burgled.  The fact is she just couldn’t be sure. There were no broken doors or windows and there were no missing electrical devices… But over a period of months since moving into a new rental property in Blacktown she had noticed some odd things like change left on the bench going missing, a portable hard drive used to store children’s movies somehow getting permanently misplaced but finally some not terribly valuable but greatly loved jewellery had gone missing from a drawer.  The young mother thought perhaps she was going crazy but I knew better.

It is common practice for a new homeowner to rekey all locks upon moving in. You don’t want the previous owners, all staff from the previous real estate, builders, cleaners, et cetera all having access to your new home. This is not the case when it comes to rental properties where landlords are under no obligation to rekey locks upon new tenants moving in. In our opinion, it really should be a legal requirement.

Quite often when items mysteriously vanish from a house in it’s the teenagers that are blamed. My new customer in this instance had her suspicions that it was Mr 13. If it had just been the loose change that gone missing this would be my first thought too but her children knew the stolen jewellery had little more than sentimental value regardless that it looked valuable.  I had to consider the possibility this was an opportunistic thief with access to the property who was entering at will, this will coming back multiple times to see there was anything else they could steal without being immediately noticed.

I recommended an immediate rekey of the back and front doors and a side sliding door. Luckily for our young mum she was blessed with an understanding landlord and when I called them to advise that in my professional opinion their tenants house was being targeted by a former tenant or some other person with access to the property they were very quick to offer to pay for the rekeying.

Mr 13 who had copped a fair bit of grief from his mum up to this time because he was the primary suspect… was pleased to be off the hook and offered to set up an internal surveillance system using the webcam from their home computer. Teenagers today. They know their way around all these technical devices.  I told him sure, why not, it certainly wouldn’t do any harm but that I was not only going to replace the front locks, but do so in a very visible way so when the thief next turned up at their house it would be very clear that the locks have been changed and they would hopefully do a quick about-face realising the jig was up and never return. Funny kid.  He was fascinated with AI-driven devices and was watching a video about some kind of elderly safety device he wanted to get his grandmother, a fall detection watch.

I have another piece of advice to go with this article and that is regardless that keeping a spare key in your wallet might say but it cost of a locksmith as you will always be able to get into your home if you have your wallet with you… This is a very risky practice. What’s lost more often than keys. They fall out of back pockets in bathrooms, they left on counters, although taken from bags.  It is one thing to have to manage the nuisance and expense of replacing all cards and to grumble about the lost cash… But if you have a spare key in your wallet you will definitely need to re-key your home anyway as you now have a known thief, your address in his hand as was the key to your front door.  Just don’t do it.

I never did hear back from Mr 13 or his mum as to how his do-it-yourself surveillance system worked out but I suspect the new deadlocks back and front did the trick in any case.