Los Altos: wide lots, long driveways, and a gate that decides where the job actually starts

Twenty-one minutes is the average across Sunnyvale, measured from the van in Moffett Park. By area: the Heritage District and Murphy Avenue 15 minutes, Moffett Park and Java Drive 15, Fair Oaks and Wolfe 17, Lakewood and the Baylands edge 19, Sunnyvale West and El Camino 19, Cherry Chase 21, Ponderosa and Ortega 21, Birdland 23. Outside the city line: Mountain View 21, Alviso and the north bay edge 25, Los Altos 27, Cupertino 27, Los Altos Hills 31. Los Altos Hills and the far side of Cupertino are honestly the slowest and you hear that on the call rather than standing in a driveway wondering. The window that arrives by text is drawn from where the van actually is, not from the average.

Both, and the access side is the bigger half of the week here. Gate operators and loop detectors, call boxes, keypads, lobby fob readers, maglocks, electric strikes, request-to-exit sensors, elevator floor restriction, garage clickers, and enrolling or removing fobs as people move in and out. It is priced like any other job at $149 to $429 with the $89 visit inside that, rather than sent away for a quote. The van carries reader stock, gate boards, strikes and blank fobs alongside cylinders and pins, because on these streets the thing that stopped you is as likely to be electric as mechanical.

Three things move a job inside its range. First, which opening it is, because a rekeyed cylinder, a lobby reader and a gate operator are different amounts of work. Second, who has the authority to order the work, since a shared opening needs a manager or an HOA and that sometimes changes what can be done in one visit. Third, which hour you are calling in. Once those three are settled the figure is a single number, not a span, and it stays that number on the receipt.

No. Your unit door is yours and so is your own fob: a lockout, a rekey your lease allows, a fob that has stopped reading, all of that you can arrange yourself. Bring photo ID showing the address, or ID plus something on your phone that ties you to the unit, such as a lease page, a rent receipt, a utility bill or addressed mail. Give the building and the unit number on the call, because a call box with ninety buttons is no help to a van circling Wolfe Road. Nobody is contacted about you, and no owner has to approve putting you back into the place you pay for.

The manager, the owner or the HOA, never a single resident. A shared opening belongs to the whole building, so the person authorizing it has to be the person responsible for it. In practice that means a property manager, an on-site manager, an owner, or a board member acting with the HOA behind them, and a management agreement or a text from the owner is enough to settle it. If you are a resident and the gate has failed at one in the morning, say so on the call anyway: getting you to your own unit door is a different job from repairing the gate, and the first one can go ahead while the second waits for the office to open.

Saturday, Sunday and holidays cost what a Wednesday afternoon costs. Only the clock changes anything: $50 between 8pm and midnight, $85 between midnight and 7am. Both are folded in before you hear a figure, so nothing appears later. A house lockout that is $125 in daylight comes back as $175 at eleven at night and $210 at four in the morning, all of it still inside the published range of $125 to $219. Given how many people here work swings and red-eyes, the late call is treated as the normal call it is.

Almost always, and it never gets drilled without your agreement. Picks, decoders and bypass tools cover unit door cylinders, fifties builder deadbolts across Cherry Chase and Ponderosa, aluminum storefronts, patio sliders, most car doors and most safes. On the electric side, a stuck maglock or gate usually comes down to the release circuit, the sensor or the board rather than anything that has to be cut. The exceptions are a high-security cylinder, one already smashed, or one welded around a snapped blade. When that is your opening you hear it plainly, you hear what would replace it, and you decide. The figure does not move either way.

Usually not. Streets through Cherry Chase, Ponderosa and Birdland are full of fifties knob sets and later deadbolts that still turn well and only need repinning so keys from three owners ago stop working. Three things genuinely earn replacing: a cylinder with real wear in it, a bolt whose throw no longer reaches the frame, and a strike screwed into trim instead of the stud behind it, which is the single detail that decides how a door behaves under a shoulder. Which of the three applies to yours is said before anything is unscrewed.

Yes, and it is worth doing the day the keys come back rather than the month the audit happens. A fob is a credential in a panel, not a key, so removing it takes the panel and the authority to use it, which means a manager, an owner or the HOA. What comes back is a list of what is live and what was removed, unit by unit, so the record is not just in someone's memory. The same visit can enroll the incoming resident, add or drop an elevator floor, and set the parcel room and amenity rooms to match. That work sits in the $149 to $429 band with the visit inside it.

All three, plus the flat streets around Ortega Park, Las Palmas Park and Washington Park, the carports behind older courts on El Camino Real, and the yards and lots along Java Drive and Mathilda Avenue. Name the lot and give a level, a row or the color of the car. A gated structure needs somebody who can get the van through, so say on the call whether that is you, the building or an attendant, because that is the one thing that turns a twenty-minute job into an hour of waiting. It does not change the figure.