Each answer below started as a phone call: a buyer the week of closing, an Army spouse reading the housing rules, a landlord between leases, a seller with an agent coming round, a manager with a door that keeps getting broken. They are grouped by what set the call off. Costs, timing and the towns we cover are in the FAQ near the bottom. We are installers, not lawyers; where a statute, a housing-office rule or a federal regulation comes up, we cite it by name so you or your own adviser can check the source.
New houses and the builder's keys
Could the builder's construction keys still open the front door of our new house in Chester or Monroe?
Possibly, and you can't tell by looking. On many new homes the locks are set up so that one construction key opens every house on the street while it is being built. The intended practice is that the homeowner's key permanently disables the construction key the first time it is used, or that the builder swaps a temporary construction core for a permanent one at closing. A homeowner on Reddit's r/homeowners put the expectation simply: "New builds should be using construction cores and swapping out to an owners core that only you get the copies for." Whether that happened on your house depends on the builder, the lock brand and whoever handled the punch list.
Keypad deadbolts add a second layer of the same problem. A builder that fits keypads as standard has usually programmed them during construction — a code for the trades, a code for the sales office, sometimes a code for the realtor. Some of those may have been deleted at closing; some may not. Schlage's own support article on factory-resetting its Encode lock warns that a factory default reset "will remove all codes and virtual keys that have been programmed to your lock," which is exactly why a reset is the cleanest starting point for a new owner when the maker allows one.
On a closing-day handover we test every exterior door with any keys the builder gave you, reset or replace the keypads, rebuild the user list from your household only, and either rekey the mechanical cylinders or replace them with new ones. You get a written list of every door, what was on it when we arrived and what is on it when we leave. Garage doors from the house and sliding doors to the deck are on that list too, because they are the doors that get forgotten.
The house is still open framing — is anything worth running to the front door before the drywall goes up?
Yes, and it costs a fraction of what it costs later. A battery smart deadbolt doesn't need any wiring, so the lock itself can wait. What can't easily wait is the cable for the things that tend to follow it: a low-voltage pair or a network cable to the door for a wired video doorbell or a video intercom, a door-position contact in the hinge-side or head jamb so an alarm or hub knows whether the door is open or shut, and a cable path from the front door to wherever the router and network panel will live.
The decisions are simple to make on a framing walkthrough. Where will the doorbell camera mount, given the door, the sidelight and the porch light? Is there a chance a wired keypad and electric strike will ever go on a side or garage entry, for instance for a home business or a caregiver? Will the router be in a basement utility room two floors away from a townhome's front door? Each answer is a cable, pulled and labelled now, with a blank cover plate at the door.
Talk to your builder's site superintendent first: most builders allow owner-contracted low-voltage work during a defined window, and some insist their own contractor does it. Our structured cabling installation in Orange County handles the pre-wire, and the door hardware goes on after closing.
Will swapping the builder's lock for a smart lock affect our new-home warranty?
Read your builder's limited warranty, because that document is what sets the details. Underneath it, New York's General Business Law section 777-a gives buyers of new homes a housing merchant implied warranty that survives the closing: one year against defects from poor workmanship or defective materials, two years for the plumbing, electrical, heating, cooling and ventilation systems, and six years against material defects.
A deadbolt is door hardware. Replacing it doesn't alter the structure, the electrical system or the door slab, and on a pre-bored door a smart deadbolt goes into the same holes. Where a builder could reasonably push back is damage caused by the swap — an enlarged bore, a chiselled-out jamb, a cracked door skin — or a claim about the door itself that the builder blames on the new hardware. That's why we use the existing bore and strike pocket wherever the lock allows and photograph the door before and after.
Keep the original builder lockset, its keys and its packaging in the house. If a door warranty issue comes up during the first year, the builder's hardware can go back on for their technician, and if you ever sell, the buyer can choose.
Army households at West Point and Stewart
We live in on-post family housing at West Point — are we allowed to put a smart lock on our quarters?
Only through the housing office, and only on its terms. West Point Family Homes' community guidelines say residents "can request permission to alter existing locks or install additional locks by submitting a Request for Alterations form to Community Management." If the request is approved, "the replacement lock must be from the same manufacturer as the existing lock and the Community Management Office must receive a copy of the new key." In practice that rules out simply ordering any smart lock you like and fitting it; it means asking first, finding out which manufacturer's hardware is on the door, and choosing a smart model from that maker if one fits.
The same guidelines explain why the office wants a key: lost keys are reported to maintenance, the lock is changed and a $50 replacement fee is charged, and residents who get locked out can ask for help — the first business-hours lockout free, a second $25, and after-hours or weekend lockouts $50, with a resident on the lease present to show identification. A smart lock that maintenance can't open with a key breaks that whole system, which is why approval comes with conditions. The guidelines add that exterior cameras, including doorbell cameras, may only be aimed at the resident's own entry and yard, not at common areas or neighbours' homes.
We don't install on post without the approved alteration in hand. If you have it, send us the approval and a photo of the existing lock and its brand stamp, and we'll tell you whether a matching smart model exists and fits your door. If it doesn't, a doorbell camera aimed at your own entry and a keypad on a door the approval covers are often the better route.
Our off-post landlord in Cornwall won't allow any drilling — is there still a keyless option?
Usually, yes. The no-drill route is a retrofit unit: it replaces only the inside thumb-turn of the existing single-cylinder deadbolt, using the deadbolt's own mounting screws, and leaves the outside cylinder and the landlord's key exactly as they are. From the outside nothing changes; from the inside the bolt can be thrown by the motor when you use the app, an auto-lock timer or, with an add-on keypad, a code. When the tour ends, the original thumb-turn goes back on and the door is as you found it.
Two checks come first. The deadbolt has to be a single-cylinder type, with a thumb-turn inside rather than a key on both sides, and it has to throw smoothly by hand, because a motor can't turn a bolt that a person struggles with. And you still need the landlord's agreement that you may swap the thumb-turn, because the lease decides what tenants may change; a written yes by email is enough for most.
If even that is refused, the alternatives are things that don't touch the door at all: a doorbell camera on a no-drill mount where the landlord allows it, a key safe the landlord approves for a family member, and a plain conversation about whether the landlord would rather fit a keypad deadbolt themselves and keep it when you leave.
We'll only be at Stewart or West Point for two or three years — is a smart lock worth buying for such a short stay?
It depends less on the length of the stay than on how often the door changes hands while you're there. A household that has a sitter, a dog walker, family visiting for weeks at a time and a spouse away for training gets value from individual codes in the first month. A household of two people who both carry keys and are rarely away may not.
If you do buy one, buy it to move with you. A retrofit unit or a standard-bore smart deadbolt can be removed at move-out, the landlord's hardware put back, and the lock fitted again at the next duty station, provided that door takes the same type of deadbolt. Keep the box, the manual and the mounting parts together, and reset the lock before you pack it, so the next house starts with a clean user list.
On post the calculation is different, because the housing office decides what is allowed and wants a key. There, a doorbell camera aimed at your own entry, which the guidelines permit, may give you more of what you want than a lock you would have to get approved and then remove.
Selling and renting
We're selling our house in Warwick — should showings go through the realtor's lockbox or a temporary code on our smart lock?
Ask your listing agent first, because many agents and the multiple listing service have their own rules for how agents get access and how showings are recorded. Within those rules, a temporary code on a smart lock has real advantages for a seller. You can give the listing agent a code that only works between set hours, give each inspector or appraiser their own code for the day of their visit, and see in the app exactly when the door was opened and locked. When the house goes under contract, or the day after closing, the codes expire on their own.
A lockbox holds a physical key, and once a copy of that key exists you can't easily know where it goes. The weakness of a code is different: codes get shared. The answer is to keep them individual, time-limited and logged, and to look at the activity log after each showing. If the agent prefers the lockbox, the two can coexist — the lockbox for the agent, timed codes for everyone else.
Don't forget the handover at the end. Before closing, factory-reset the lock or delete every code and your own app account, leave the buyer the mechanical keys and the manual, and tell them the lock is reset. A buyer who inherits a smart lock with the seller's account still attached is the next owner who has to call us.
We own a dozen rental houses spread from Port Jervis to Newburgh — can one app run all the locks?
Yes, if you choose the hardware for it. Many consumer smart lock apps support several homes on one account, so a landlord can see every lock in one list, issue and cancel codes remotely and check battery levels from anywhere. Standardise on one brand and one model where the doors allow, connect each lock through Wi-Fi or a bridge so it can be managed remotely, and keep a spreadsheet of which code belongs to which tenant, contractor and cleaner at which address. That's what turns a turnover from a locksmith visit into a few minutes on a phone.
The law matters more than the app. New York's Real Property Actions and Proceedings Law section 768, added statewide by the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, makes it unlawful to evict or try to evict an occupant who has lived in a unit for 30 consecutive days or longer, or who has a lease, by means that include "changing the lock on such entrance door without supplying the occupant with a key." The Attorney General's guidance to police treats unlawful eviction as a class A misdemeanor, and the section adds civil penalties of $1,000 to $10,000 per violation. Deleting a sitting tenant's code to force them out is the digital version of changing the lock. Codes come off when a tenant has actually moved out, or when a court says so.
Give each tenant both a code and a physical key, write into the lease how codes are issued, changed and removed, and tell tenants in writing what the lock records. We set the locks up that way across a portfolio, one visit per house, and leave you the register of what is on every door.
Businesses
Truck drivers check in at our Montgomery distribution building — how do we let them into the drivers' room without letting them into the warehouse?
Treat the drivers' room as its own small building with its own door. Many distribution buildings along I-84 and Route 17K give drivers a separate entrance to a room with a check-in window, a restroom and a waiting area, with a second door from that room into the warehouse. The outside door can be open during receiving hours or released by a keypad code that changes daily or weekly; the inner door into the warehouse takes a staff credential only, so a code that drivers know never opens the floor.
Use a reader or keypad with an electric strike on the inner door, not a standalone battery lock, so the door can be tied to the building's schedule and its alarm, and so a lost staff fob can be cancelled from a computer. Put a camera on both doors and keep the inner door's events in a log someone actually looks at. The exit side of both doors stays free — a lever or panic bar — because a drivers' room is still part of the building's way out.
If you're in a new speculative building, raise this with the landlord's fit-out team before the walls go up. A cable to each door and a power supply location agreed in advance is far cheaper than adding them to finished block walls.
Forklifts keep clipping the keypad beside our Wallkill dock door — where should it go instead?
Out of the path of the equipment, first of all. A keypad mounted on the wall right beside a loading-dock personnel door sits exactly where pallet jacks, forklifts and swinging pallets pass, and it gets knocked, cracked and pulled off its box. In the large new buildings along I-84 and Route 17K, we look at the traffic pattern before choosing the spot: which side of the door the trucks and lifts approach from, where pallets are staged, and where a person on foot naturally stands to use the door.
The fixes are simple once you see the path. Move the keypad or reader to the frame on the protected side of the door, or recess it into the wall so nothing projects; put it behind the line of an existing bollard or guard rail, or ask the building owner to add one; and choose a metal-housed, impact-resistant reader instead of a plastic keypad. A fob or card reader is easier than a keypad for staff wearing gloves, and it can't be read off a worn button.
Run the cable inside conduit from the reader to the controller or power supply, with the conduit clear of the dock area, and put the door's exit hardware where it can't be fouled either. A door event log is only useful if the reader that writes it is still on the wall.
Our Goshen office sees clients by appointment only — can staff let a visitor in from their desk?
Yes. The usual set-up for a small professional office is a video intercom or video doorbell at the street or building door and an electric strike in that door, so the person at the front desk sees the visitor, speaks to them and releases the door with a button or an app without leaving the desk. Staff and partners use their own codes or fobs at the same door, so nobody has to be buzzed in to get to work.
In an older village building the main design question is where the cables go. Strikes need a low-voltage run from the door frame to a power supply, and the intercom needs a run to the desk or a network connection. In a building with plaster walls or a shared hallway, we plan the route at the walkthrough, use surface raceway where we have to, and tell the landlord exactly what will be visible before we start.
Keep the door's exit side simple, set the strike to the right fail mode for that door, and decide in advance what happens after hours — whether the intercom rings through to a phone or simply goes unanswered. Those three decisions make the difference between a front door that works for clients and one that frustrates them.
