For my last job of the day yesterday my customer showed up late. I told him I was going to add a little to the bill for the time I spent waiting. He said, “Listen, I’m really sorry. If I’d known you were going to charge extra for tardiness I would have left the office earlier and gotten here on time.”

It’s quite common for managers of apartment buildings and condominiums to keep copies of all the unit keys on site. This is useful if a resident gets locked out or if there’s an emergency maintenance issue like a gas leak or a burst pipe when no one is home. Last week there was a break-in at the office of a large condominium complex in Sammamish and the keys to hundreds of units were stolen. The property managers hired a large locksmith company to resolve the problem, but they couldn’t come out for a week. Meanwhile, some thief had keys to all the residents’ apartments. I’ve been pretty busy rekeying locks for many of the folks who didn’t want to wait for the locksmith hired by the management company.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen something like this. Once I did a bunch of work for a maid service company that had all its keys stolen and subsequently had to take responsibility for securing all of its clients’ houses. Another time a client who is a residential property manager had his laptop and a bunch of keys stolen from his home office. The keys were not labeled with their addresses but there was enough information in the laptop to figure out what address each key went to. We thought we were being overly cautious when we treated this like a five-alarm emergency, contacting all the tenants to quickly rekey their houses. But the one couple who was sluggish about scheduling with me saw their home burglarized.

If you’ve been entrusted to keep a lot of people’s keys, how do you store them? Are they in a proper safe or are they in a flimsy steel lockbox that can be pried open with ease? Are they labeled with the bare unit numbers are do you have a coding system that’s not easily decipherable? If all of the keys were stolen, how quickly could you secure all those homes, and what would it cost? Do you already have a plan in place? If these questions make you uncomfortable, it might mean that you need to get your house in order. And if the place that you live keeps a copy of the key to your home, you would not be unreasonable to ask some of these questions.