Just Moved to Jacksonville? A Lock Checklist for Your First Week
Rekey every exterior door in your first day or two in the house. That is the item people skip, and it is the one that matters most, because you are not the only person holding a working key to your new home.
Who else has your keys
Think about who had access while the place was on the market. The sellers, obviously. Their listing agent, plus every showing agent who opened the lockbox. The inspector. The cleaner who did the pre-listing scrub. If the house sat vacant, add whoever checked on it after storms. None of these people are villains. Any of them could still open your front door tonight.
The fix is cheap. Rekeying keeps your existing hardware and swaps the pins inside so the old keys die, typically around $20 to $40 per lock plus a trip fee that usually runs $30 to $100. A house with four exterior doors generally comes in under $250. Plenty of new owners buy all new deadbolts when a rekey would do; our guide to rekeying vs. changing locks explains when each makes sense.
The garage is probably your real front door
Drive through Mandarin or Orange Park at 6 p.m. and watch how people actually get into their houses. Through the garage. In much of Jacksonville the front door is mostly decoration, which makes the garage keypad your real house key. Three jobs here:
- Change the keypad code, then test that the old code is dead.
- Clear the opener's memory and re-pair your own remotes. The sellers' cars may still have it programmed into their visor buttons.
- Rekey the door between the garage and the kitchen. Builders love hanging a bargain knob lock there.
The cheap fixes most movers skip
Walk the house and try every window latch. Older homes in Riverside and Arlington often have latches painted over or corroded in the unlocked position, and a window that will not lock is a ground-level open door. Then handle the sliding glass slider: factory latches on those doors are famously flimsy, so drop a security bar or a cut wooden dowel in the track. Five dollars of hardware defeats one of the easiest break-in methods in Florida.
The mailbox is a lock too. If your street uses cluster boxes, common in newer developments out toward the beaches and Ponte Vedra, the previous owner may still hold that key. Arrange a lock change through your post office before replacement debit cards start landing in there.
Factory-reset anything smart the sellers left
A leftover smart lock comes with a catch: the sellers' phones may still control it. Changing the code is not enough. Do a full factory reset, set the lock up under your own account, and delete every access code you did not create yourself. Give video doorbells and alarm panels the same treatment. And if you are debating whether that smart lock is worth keeping at all, we weighed the tradeoffs in smart locks vs. deadbolts.
One more pass before hurricane season
Jacksonville doors swell. Between the humidity and the June-to-November storm season, a door that latched fine in April can need a hip check by August. Test that every exterior door closes and latches under its own weight, and that each deadbolt throws fully into the strike plate, not halfway. A locksmith can adjust a strike plate during the same visit as your rekey.
One scheduling note: Duval County covers a huge amount of land, so a locksmith based on the Northside can honestly need 45 minutes to reach Jacksonville Beach, even taking I-295. Book someone who works your side of town, and vet them like any contractor. Our guide to finding a locksmith you can trust shows how.
If you would rather not research lock companies in the middle of a move, that part can be handed off. We maintain a network of independent locksmiths we have already screened, and we match homeowners by ZIP code with pros who actually cover their neighborhood. It costs nothing to use; the search form is on our home page.
Tape the list to the fridge and give it one weekend. Six jobs, most under an hour each, and the only working keys to your house are the ones sitting on your counter.
