Moving Home Security Checklist: Your First Week in a New House

A moving home security checklist exists because of one uncomfortable fact: the keys handed over at closing are the keys somebody chose to hand over. They are not necessarily all the keys. Over a typical ten-year ownership a house key gets copied for a cleaner, a dog walker, two sets of in-laws, a contractor who never gave it back, and a teenager who lost one at school in 2019.

None of those people are likely to be a problem. That is not the point. The point is that you cannot know, and the fix costs less than the moving truck did.

This list is written for the houses around here specifically: 1980s and 1990s subdivision stock in Glenway and Bristol-London with a garage man-door nobody thinks about, newer East Gwillimbury and Sharon builds still on their builder key, century homes off Main Street South with hardware from three different decades on one elevation, and townhouses near Yonge and Davis with a shared-entry fob system. Work through it in the first week and you can stop thinking about it.

Day one: every exterior cylinder

This is the whole job in one sentence: every lock that opens from outside gets a new key on day one, and you decide how many copies exist from then on.

For most houses that is more doors than people expect. Front, back or side entry, the garage man-door, the door from the garage into the house, and sometimes a basement walk-out or a shed. Four to six cylinders is normal. The door from the garage into the house is the one people skip, and it is the one that matters most: an open garage door turns that lock into your front door.

Rekeying re-pins the cylinder you already own so the old key stops working. It runs roughly $25 to $45 per lock plus the service call, and everything can be keyed alike so one key opens the whole house. Replacement makes sense where hardware is worn, mismatched, or where a door has a latch and no deadbolt. The rekey or replace guide has a decision table if you are unsure, and new home lock changes is the service page for the work itself.

• Front entry deadbolt and handle set.
• Back or side entry, including any patio door with a keyed cylinder.
• Garage man-door, the pedestrian door on the side of the garage.
• Garage-to-house door. Do not skip this one.
• Basement walk-out or separate apartment entry.
• Shed, workshop and any outbuilding worth locking.
• Mailbox, if it is a community box with a keyed door.

One visit, one trip charge, all of them keyed alike, and you leave with exactly the number of keys you asked for. Budget somewhere between $140 and $280 for a typical Newmarket house depending on the door count, and see locksmith prices for the full ranges.

Count the keys that used to exist

Ask the previous owner, or the agent, a direct question before closing: how many keys were made, and who has them? You will get an incomplete answer, which is itself informative. Add the ones nobody mentions.

The realistic list on a house that has been lived in for a decade: the sellers and their adult children, a cleaning service, a landscaper, a contractor who did the basement, both sets of parents, a neighbour who watered the plants, and whoever had the lockbox code during the listing. Some of those keys have been copied again.

None of this requires suspicion of anyone in particular. It requires accepting that the number is unknown, and that an unknown number is the same as a large one for planning purposes. Rekeying resets that count to whatever you decide.

For rental properties, do this between every tenancy without exception. It takes under an hour and it is the cheapest line item in the turnover.

The garage, which is the real weak point

On most local subdivision houses the garage is the softest part of the building, and it usually gets the least attention on move-in week.

Start with the remote codes. Every opener made in the last twenty-odd years uses a rolling code, but the previous owner may still have paired remotes, a keypad code and a car HomeLink button that opens your door. Clearing all remotes and re-pairing only yours is a button sequence in the manual, usually a Learn button on the motor head held down until the indicator clears. Do it the day you move in, then re-pair your own remotes and set a new keypad PIN.

Then the emergency release. The red cord on the trolley can be hooked from outside through the top of the door gap on some older installations. A zip tie through the release lever, sized so a hard pull still breaks it in a genuine emergency, closes that off. So does a simple shield over the top panel.

Finally the garage-to-house door. It should have a deadbolt, it should be solid core rather than hollow, and its strike should be screwed into the framing with three-inch screws. Treat it exactly as you would a front door, because functionally it is one.

Doors, windows and the things people forget

Half an afternoon with a screwdriver covers most of this.

• Patio slider. Fit a bar or a cut length of dowel in the track, and add a secondary pin lock through the frame so the panel cannot be lifted out of the track. The factory latch on a slider is a catch, not a lock.
• Basement windows. Check every latch actually engages. Older casement hardware around here is often painted open or the crank is stripped.
• Window latches upstairs. Above a porch roof or a deck, treat a second-floor window as a ground-floor one.
• Strike plates. Replace the three-quarter-inch screws that came with the hardware with three-inch screws that reach the stud behind the jamb. Ten minutes, a few dollars, and it changes what the door can survive.
• Mailbox lock. Community boxes and older wall boxes are usually a barrel cam lock costing under $25 to swap. Mail is how identity theft starts.
• Exterior lighting. Walk the property at night before you decide anything. Dark corners look different in June and in December.
• Spare key hiding places. Find the previous owner rock, magnetic box or the one under the mat. There is almost always one. Then do not create your own.
• Alarm panel. If the house has one, change the master code and any user codes, and either activate monitoring or remove the panel from the wall so it stops being decoration.

Smart locks, cameras and account handovers

Inherited smart hardware is the newest item on this list and the one that goes wrong most often. A smart lock or camera left behind is not yours until the account is, and a factory reset of the device is not the same as removing the previous owner from the cloud account attached to it.

The order that works: get the previous owner to delete the device from their account and remove the home or location entirely, then factory reset the hardware yourself, then set it up fresh under your own account with a new password. If they cannot or will not do the first step, some devices stay tied to the old account and effectively have to be replaced. Ask about this before closing, not after.

Then clear the codes. A keypad lock inherited with the house may hold ten user PINs — a dog walker, a cleaner, a neighbour, an ex-partner. Delete every code including the master, then add only yours. Same for a video doorbell: check for shared users and old guest access.

A doorbell camera also carries a footage history. Anything recorded before you owned the property stays under the previous owner account, which is fine, but do not assume the reverse — confirm that your new footage is not still visible to them. If you are adding hardware rather than inheriting it, smart lock installation and camera installation can be done in the same visit as the rekey.

New builds: the builder key problem

If you bought new in East Gwillimbury, Sharon, Queensville or one of the newer Newmarket phases, your situation is slightly different and slightly worse.

Most builders use a construction keying system. The house is locked on a construction key that every trade on the site can use — framers, drywallers, painters, the cleaners, the HVAC crew, the appliance delivery. At closing you are given a homeowner key, and inserting it once mechanically retires the construction key by shearing a set of pins.

That works, provided it happened. Two things go wrong. First, the system only applies to locks that were part of the builder program, so a lock added later may never have been on it. Second, and more commonly, the builder hardware is Grade 3 at best, chosen on price for a hundred houses at a time, and the cylinder that just retired its construction key is still the cheapest cylinder available in Canada.

Our practical advice on a new build: use the homeowner key once so the construction key retires, then upgrade the front and garage-to-house locks to Grade 1 or Grade 2 within the first year, and rekey the rest to match. You will not miss the builder hardware.

Also, before the first winter in a new build, read the Canadian winter lock guide. New doors move as the house settles and as the framing dries, and a strike that lined up in August often does not in January.

The one-page checklist

Work down it. Most people finish in a weekend plus one locksmith visit.

• Rekey or replace every exterior cylinder, keyed alike.
• Include the garage man-door and the garage-to-house door.
• Decide how many keys exist, and cut exactly that many.
• Clear all garage opener remotes, re-pair yours, set a new keypad PIN.
• Secure the opener emergency release from outside access.
• Fit a bar and a pin lock to the patio slider.
• Test every window latch, including the basement.
• Three-inch screws into the framing behind every exterior strike plate.
• Change the mailbox lock.
• Delete every code from inherited keypads and smart locks, then add yours.
• Get the previous owner to release smart lock and camera accounts, then factory reset.
• Change the alarm master code and remove old user codes.
• Find and remove the previous owner hidden spare key.
• Walk the property after dark and note where light is missing.
• New build: use the homeowner key once, then plan a hardware upgrade.

What a move-in visit looks like

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