This page is written for someone standing outside a door right now. If that is you, the short version is at the top and the detail is underneath. The number is (850) 738-8677 and it is answered around the clock.
First: is anyone inside?
If a child, an infant, an older person, or a pet is shut in a vehicle — call 911 first. Before us, before anyone.
This is not a formality and it is not us being cautious. The inside of a closed car in the Florida sun becomes dangerous within minutes, not hours, and it keeps climbing after that. A car left in a beach car park at midday can reach a temperature that causes harm to a small child faster than any locksmith in the county can reach you. Emergency services are dispatched to exactly this, they are usually closer than we are, and they are authorised to open the vehicle immediately by whatever means the situation requires.
Call 911. Stay with the vehicle. Then, if it still needs a locksmith afterwards, call us.
The same applies to anyone shut inside a building who is hurt, confused, in distress, or unable to reach the door, and to any situation involving smoke, gas or water. Emergency services first.
The first sixty seconds
Assuming nobody is in danger, take a minute before you do anything else. Most of the calls we take could have been shorter, cheaper, or avoided entirely if these things had been checked first.
- Check every other door. Actually check them, physically, one at a time. Back doors, side doors, the slider onto the deck, the door from the garage, the door onto the balcony if you can reach it safely. On rental properties an unlocked back door is one of the most common outcomes.
- Check your pockets and the ground. Keys fall out of a pocket when you get out of a car. They land in footwells, between seats, in the sand by the boot, and on the path. Retrace the last two minutes before assuming they are gone.
- If it is a rental, contact the manager before anyone else. They very often have a code, a lockbox, a spare key nearby, or a cleaner who was on site an hour ago. Their number is on your booking confirmation. This is free and it is frequently the fastest route inside.
- Look for the lockbox. If your arrival instructions mentioned one, find it before assuming the code is wrong. Lockboxes get moved, and there are sometimes two on a property from different eras.
- Is the key inside, or actually lost? These are different problems with different solutions and the answer changes what we bring.
- Are you safe where you are? If it is dark, if you are alone, if the weather has turned, or if you are somewhere you would rather not stand around, move somewhere lit and public and make the call from there.
Then call, and have these ready
When you ring (850) 738-8677, the conversation goes much faster if you already know:
- Where you are. A property name and number, or a car park and what you are parked next to. The corridor is long and a vague location costs real time.
- What kind of lockout. House, rental, car, or a room inside a property.
- For a vehicle: make, model, rough year, and whether any key exists anywhere — a spare at home, one with a partner, one back at the rental.
- For a property: is it a key, a keypad, or a lockbox, and are you the owner, the guest, or the tenant.
- What proof you can show. This one surprises people, so it has its own section below.
Why we will ask you to prove it is yours
Every legitimate locksmith asks. If one does not, that should worry you rather than please you — the same lack of interest in who you are applies to whoever turns up at your door next.
What works: a driving licence or other photo identification with an address matching the property, a booking confirmation or rental agreement in your name for a holiday let, a lease, a vehicle registration or insurance document, or the property manager confirming directly that you are the guest. For a rental, the booking email on your phone is usually enough, and you almost certainly have it.
If you have nothing at all — wallet inside, phone dead, everything in the house — say so on the call rather than at the door. There is almost always a way to establish it, usually through the manager, the owner or the letting agency, and it is far quicker to start that process while someone is on their way than to discover the problem when they arrive.
What not to do
The damage we are called to repair is almost always self-inflicted in the twenty minutes before the call.
- Do not break glass to reach a latch. It is dangerous, it is expensive, and on a rental it is a conversation with the owner that you do not want. A glass panel costs many times what an opening costs.
- Do not force the door with a shoulder or a crowbar. Forcing a door does not usually break the lock; it breaks the frame, which is a joinery job on top of the lock job.
- Do not slide a card into the gap. On a deadlatched door it does nothing, and on the doors where it does anything it tends to bend the latch or scar the frame.
- Do not push a broken key further in. If a key has snapped, leave the piece exactly where it is, dry and untouched. It comes out far more easily that way.
- Do not put oil or penetrating spray into a lock. It coats everything, it attracts sand, and it turns a five-minute job into a cylinder replacement.
- Do not use a coat hanger down a car window seal. Modern doors have wiring, airbag components and window mechanisms in the exact place the hanger goes. People do hundreds of dollars of damage this way and still do not get in.
- Do not climb. Balconies, decks, second-floor windows and stacked furniture. This is the one that actually hurts people. A lockout is an inconvenience; a fall is not.
- Do not keep entering a code that is not working. Many keypads lock out after repeated failures, and you will turn a code problem into a wait.
House and rental lockouts on 30A
The corridor runs on short-term rentals, and rental lockouts behave differently from ordinary house lockouts. The property is not yours, the person who can authorise entry may be somewhere else entirely, and the door is quite likely a keypad rather than a key.
If the code is not working, the two most common causes are a code that has not started yet — many are scheduled to activate at check-in time, not before — and a code that was superseded by a newer one in a later message. Check the most recent message from your host, and check the time. If both look right, contact the manager before assuming the lock has failed.
If the keypad is dead altogether — no lights, no beep, no response — that is usually batteries, and it is a hardware problem rather than a code problem. Tell us that on the call.
If the code is accepted but the door will not open, the lock is trying and something mechanical is stopping it: a bolt binding against the strike, a swollen door, or a motor that no longer has the power to throw. This is common in summer here, and it is worth knowing that the fault is the door, not you.
If it is your own house, the questions are simpler: which doors have you actually tried, does anyone else have a key locally, and is there a spare somewhere you have forgotten about. If a neighbour, family member or cleaner holds one and can be there quickly, that beats any call-out.
Car lockouts
Second only to rental doors in volume, and heavily concentrated in beach car parks in the afternoon.
The three situations are quite different. Keys visible inside the car is the simplest — it is an opening, and the key still exists. Keys genuinely lost is a bigger job, because after getting in you still need a key made and, on most vehicles, programmed. Keys locked in the boot is its own case, and on many cars there is a route through the cabin.
Before calling, check whether your vehicle has an app that can unlock it remotely, and whether a spare key exists anywhere reachable — at the rental, with someone in your party, at home. A spare key half an hour away is often the better answer.
Two safety notes. If the car is on a road, a verge, or anywhere traffic passes close, stand well away from it, on the far side of any barrier, and wait there. And if the vehicle is a hire car, check the rental agreement first; some hire companies require you to use their own service and will not reimburse otherwise.
Interior door lockouts
Bathroom and bedroom doors in rentals get a lot of use by people unfamiliar with them, and privacy locks get engaged by accident constantly — particularly by children, who then cannot work out how to release them.
Most privacy sets have an emergency release on the outside: a small hole, slot or button in the centre of the knob or lever. A straightened paperclip or a small screwdriver, pushed straight in or turned, releases it. That is a standard feature, not a security bypass, and it is there precisely for this. If someone is shut in and distressed — especially a child — and the release does not work, treat it as urgent and call emergency services rather than working at the door.
After you are back inside
Worth ten minutes once the immediate problem is over. Find out where the spare key actually is, and whether it works — plenty of “spares” turn out to be for a lock that was changed years ago. If the property is a rental you own or manage, note whether the code system, the lockbox or the batteries were the cause, because the same failure will happen to the next guest. If the door was binding, get it looked at now rather than in August when it is worse. And if you lost keys rather than locking them in, consider whether the lock should be re-keyed, because a set of keys lost on a beach with a rental address attached is a different matter from keys lost in your own kitchen.
Common questions
Call 911 immediately. Do not wait for a locksmith. Heat inside a closed vehicle here becomes dangerous very quickly, and emergency services can open it straight away.
Ordinary lockouts are handled without damage in the great majority of cases. Damage becomes likely when a door has already been forced, when a lock has been sprayed with oil, or when a broken key has been pushed deeper before the call.
The line is answered around the clock. We will not promise you a time on this page, because promising an arrival window we cannot control helps nobody standing in a car park — we would rather tell you honestly on the phone.
Say so when you call. There is usually a route — a property manager, an owner, or a letting agency confirming who you are — and starting it early saves everyone time.
Check the time the code was due to start, and check for a newer code in a later message. Then contact your host. If the pad is dead or the bolt is binding, that is a hardware fault and worth telling us about when you call.
No. It is dangerous, it costs far more than an opening, and on a property that is not yours it creates a problem that outlasts the lockout by a long way.
Where this brand works
This is a 30A brand. We cover the Scenic Highway 30A corridor and the rental properties, houses and car parks along it. If you are somewhere on 30A and shut out of something, this is the right number.
Licensed and insured. Proof of ownership required. Call (850) 738-8677 — and if anyone is shut in a vehicle, call 911 first.