These are the questions uptown households, co-op shareholders and shop owners actually put to us, grouped by what is really being asked. Where a law or a published rule decides the answer, we name it so you can read it yourself; nothing here is legal advice.
Codes for everyone who really lives here
A relative lives with us but isn't on the lease — can she have her own code on a lock we put in?
Yes. A smart lock that you add to your apartment door is yours to program, and the people who get codes are whoever the household chooses: a mother who moved in after a hospital stay, an adult son, a cousin staying for the year. The lease decides who the landlord deals with; it does not decide who you may let through your own door. We set each person up with their own code rather than one shared number, so the activity log shows that she came in at 4:10 and her grandson at 6:45, and so you can change one person's code without disturbing anyone else. For a relative who will never use a phone, the code is the whole system; we tape nothing to the door and give her a printed card to keep in her purse. What the household must still do is honor the owner's rights: the landlord's lock stays in place and the owner can ask for a duplicate key to the lock you added.
Our building gives lobby fobs only to people named on the lease — does a unit smart lock have to follow that rule?
No; those are two different doors. The street or lobby door belongs to the building, and the owner runs whatever system it chose there, within city and state rules. When residents of 765 Riverside Drive were told in 2018 that only leaseholders would get lobby fobs and that each fob needed a $50 deposit, then-Council Member Mark Levine told CBS2 the policy violated city rules on keys and suggested a complaint to the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal if management would not fix it. That is a building dispute, and we stay out of it. Your apartment door is different: a lock you add there answers to you. So a household member without a fob can still have a personal code upstairs, even if, for now, someone has to buzz them in downstairs. If the lobby problem is the bigger one, the building's owner or board can talk to us about the lobby system separately.
If the leaseholder moves out or passes away, how does the rest of the household keep control of the lock?
Plan for it on day one. Smart lock apps have one owner or administrator account and any number of users; if the only administrator is the person whose name is on the lease and their phone is gone, the household is left with working codes and no way to change them. We set up a second administrator — usually the adult who handles family paperwork — on a separate phone and email, and we record on the handover sheet which account owns the lock. Codes keep working when an account changes hands, so nobody is locked out while the family sorts things out. What the lock cannot settle is the tenancy itself: whether a family member can stay on in a rent-stabilized apartment is a question for the state housing agency or a tenant lawyer, not for an installer. The lock should never become the reason someone loses their home, so we will not program a lock to shut out a person who lives there.
The owner's lock and the owner's duties
Our door already has two locks of different ages — which one should the smart lock replace?
Usually neither of the landlord's. New York's Multiple Dwelling Law section 51-c lets a tenant install and maintain a lock in addition to the lock the owner supplied, of no more than three inches in circumference, provided the tenant gives the owner a duplicate key on request. So the first job at a door with two locks is to work out which is the owner's and which a previous tenant added. If the second lock is an old tenant lock that nobody has a key for, it is the natural place for the smart deadbolt: we remove it, check that the bore and backset suit the new lock, and fit it there, which means no new hole. If both locks belong to the owner, we leave them alone and look for the cleanest spot for a third, or suggest an inside-only retrofit on a lock you already control. Either way the owner's cylinder and key keep working exactly as before.
The landlord's lock on our apartment door is broken — should we just swap in a smart lock ourselves?
Report it first. The city's Housing Maintenance Code makes the owner responsible for a working lock and key on each apartment entrance door, and the LawHelpNY guide to HPD violations lists a defective entrance-door lock or knob as a class B hazardous condition. You file it through 311 as an apartment maintenance complaint and HPD inspects. If you simply take the broken lock out and fit your own in its place, you may end up paying for the owner's repair and muddying the record of a condition the landlord was required to fix. The better pattern is to let the owner repair or replace their lock, then add your smart lock alongside it. If you are locked out tonight because of the broken lock, that is an emergency: call the building's emergency contact first, and if no one answers, 311. We can come the same or next day for the smart lock once the door is secure.
Can the landlord bill us, or raise the rent, because we added a lock of our own?
The same section of the Multiple Dwelling Law that lets a tenant add a lock also says that a lease clause requiring the tenant to pay for exercising that right is void. In plain terms, the owner is entitled to a duplicate key to your additional lock on request, but not to a fee for your having it. A lock you buy and have fitted is not an improvement the owner made, so it is not the kind of work that can be passed on in the rent. What you do owe the owner is a door left in good order: if you take the smart lock with you at the end of the tenancy, the hole should be filled with a cylinder or cover plate and the door left looking as it did. We note on our invoice that the lock was supplied and installed for the tenant, which helps if anyone asks later. If a charge does appear, the state housing agency and tenant organisations are the people to talk to.
The street door downstairs no longer latches — is that ours to fix or the owner's?
It is the owner's, and it is urgent. LawHelpNY's HPD checklist lists "no lock on entrance door to building" as a class C immediately hazardous condition, which the guide says the landlord has 24 hours to correct once a violation is issued. Tenants should report it through 311 as a public area maintenance complaint, which covers doors and locks that are broken, missing or not self-closing. A smart lock on your apartment is not a substitute for a working street door, and a tenant should not pay to repair the building entrance. If the owner or the board decides to upgrade the street door rather than just fix it, our Manhattan access control and door buzzer teams work on lobby keypads, fob readers and strikes; a single-door keypad or fob reader with an electric strike is $1,875–$3,125 installed at the Manhattan rate, priced for the building, not the tenant.
Old doors and changed buildings
Decades of paint have built up on our door and frame — does that matter for a new lock?
It matters more than the choice of brand. Thick paint narrows the gap between door and frame, fills the strike pocket and sometimes glues the hinges so the door sags. A motorised deadbolt then has to push its bolt past paint and into a strike that is no longer where the bolt lands, and it either jams halfway or strains until the batteries die. Before fitting anything we cut back paint along the latch edge and the strike, open the strike pocket to full depth, and check that the door closes and latches on its own weight. If the frame has been painted over the old strike, we re-seat it rather than enlarge the hole. In buildings old enough to have lead paint under the newer layers, we keep the scraping to the minimum the lock needs, contain the dust and clean up with a HEPA vacuum. If the door itself is warped, we say so before quoting, because no lock fixes a door that does not close.
I rent a stabilized apartment in a building that went co-op — whose rules apply to my door, the board's or the law's?
Both, in different ways. Many uptown buildings, especially in Hudson Heights, converted from rentals to co-ops from the 1980s onward, and tenants who stayed on kept their rent-stabilized leases; the NYU Furman Center estimates about 16,000 such units citywide. As a tenant, your landlord is the owner of your unit's shares — often the original sponsor or an investor — and the tenant protections that apply to your apartment come with you, including the right in the Multiple Dwelling Law to add a lock of your own. The co-op's house rules govern the building and its shareholders, and the managing agent will still expect any contractor on site to carry insurance and work within building hours. In practice we ask the managing agent's office what it needs to see, keep the corridor face of the door unchanged where we can, and give the unit owner a duplicate key. We will tell you if a request goes beyond what the rules allow.
Coming and going on a working day
I come home from a night shift at 3 a.m. — what is the quickest way in that doesn't depend on fishing for keys or a phone?
A fingerprint reader or a short personal code, with the phone as a backup rather than the main key. After twelve hours on a ward, nobody wants to unlock a phone, wait for Bluetooth and tap a screen on a dim landing. A fingerprint deadbolt opens with a touch; a keypad opens with four to eight digits you can enter by feel if the keypad is backlit. We enroll two fingers per person, in case one is cut or bandaged, and test them with dry and with washed hands. Auto-unlock features that open the door as your phone approaches exist, but in a walk-up where the phone may lose signal in the stairwell they are less dependable, so we do not rely on them. We also set the lock to relock itself a short time after the door closes, so a tired person who forgets to turn the bolt is still locked in safely. The mechanical key remains in your pocket for the day everything else fails.
I already carry keys for the street door, the inner door and the mailbox — is a keypad on the apartment worth it?
It depends on who else needs to get in. If you are the only person using the apartment, a smart lock removes one key from a ring that still has three; the convenience is real but small. Where it earns its place is with everyone else: the aide who comes four days a week, the nephew who picks up the mail when you travel, the cleaner, the relative who arrives from the airport. Each of them needs a key to the apartment today, and copies of keys travel. With a keypad on your door, the only key that has to be copied is the street-door key the building already controls, and the apartment code can be time-limited, changed and logged. If the building later adds a code or fob at the street door, the whole trip from sidewalk to sofa can be keyless; until then, the smart lock still takes the most sensitive key off the ring.
People, trust and technology
Someone who used to stay with us still has a key — can we change the lock to keep them out?
It depends on whether they lived there. If the person only visited, changing codes or re-keying your own lock is your decision and we can do it the same day. If the person lived in the apartment for 30 consecutive days or more, New York City's unlawful eviction law, Administrative Code section 26-521, makes it unlawful to remove them by changing the lock without supplying a key, and section 26-523 attaches penalties of $1,000 to $10,000 per violation. That applies to households as well as landlords. In that situation, talk to Housing Court, a legal aid organisation or, where there is a safety risk, the police and a court order first. Where a court has excluded someone, we can change every code and the mechanical cylinder in one visit and leave you a record of what was changed. We will not change a lock to exclude someone who lives there without that footing.
What happens to our lock if the company behind its app stops supporting it?
The lock should still work as a lock, and choosing for that is part of our job. Companies change: Latch, the app-based lock found in many New York buildings, rebranded as DOOR in August 2025 and said existing Latch hardware would continue to be supported. Not every brand handles a change so smoothly. So we favour locks whose keypad codes and fingerprints are stored in the lock itself and keep working with no internet, which keep a mechanical key cylinder, and which support open standards such as Matter or Z-Wave so another app or hub could take over. We also write down the master or programming code on your handover sheet, because with most keypad locks that code lets you add and delete users at the door even if the app is gone. The features that depend on the company's servers, such as remote unlocking and phone alerts, are the ones you could lose; the door would still open for the people who live there.
