Local Home Services

When a homeowner or business owner calls on the services of a local Kendal locksmith, he or she expects to be calling on the services of a professional tradesman in the same why that you’d expect any tradesmen you call on to know their profession.

You call on the services of a heating engineer to have your boiler serviced, repaired or have a new one installed and you’re guaranteed to have a professional heating engineer turn up who is professional, fully trained, highly skilled and able to carry out the task at hand without running into problems, same goes when you call out an electrician to do repairs, upgrades or re-wires and its because these industries are regulated by governing bodies meaning its illegal for someone to simply set themselves up as an electrician, a heating engineer or wide range of other regulated trades without being qualified, the locksmith industry on the other hand is a different story as it’s perfectly legal for anyone to tout themselves as a locksmith with little or sometime no training and it’s too late once you call out one of these amateurs who’ll turn up arm with a drill, a chisel and an hammer ready to literally break into your property.

However it’s not just the locksmith industry where this unfortunately happens, many industries and trades have amateurs and rogues touting for work and giving that entire industry a bad name, industries and business sectors such as landscape gardening, tree felling, joinery all have their fair share of amateurs and conmen overcharging for poor, substandard work and then there are more modern unregulated industries such as web design and internet marketing where the have a go amateurs are currently running a mock and charging the unsuspected public and business owners a fortune for a service they know very little about, of course unlike landscape gardening, tree felling, joinery and the locksmith industry these modern I.T. amateurs can’t do any property damage but the business owner still ends up out of pocket.

For this article we’ll focus on the growing number of amateurs entering the locksmith industry in recent years and the reason for this increase, we’ll also discuss how business owners and the public can take steps to avoid falling for a rogue and unskilled locksmith and how they can take precautions when searching for local locksmiths online to make sure that the locksmith they do call out is professional, properly trained and equipped to do the job at hand.

What makes a locksmith professional if the industry is unregulated?

Training, it’s all down to professional hands on professional locksmith training. Being a locksmith is a skill, and when a locksmith turns up at the house or the business your locked out of and immediately gets out his drill or his hammer and chisel you know he’s a amateur as the first port of call for any professional locksmith should be the trusty lock pick be it a manual set of picks or some fancy electronic pick this is what’s known as non-destructive entry and a professional will always attempt this first before doing any damage to your property. The amateur, with little or no training, will simple hammer and drill away will little regard for your property and expect to be compensated at the end for his efforts.

Locksmith training is involved and ongoing, one professional locksmith we spoke to told us that your training is never complete because there are always new so called pick proof locks coming onto the market, new gadgets to learn how to use and new more advanced courses to pass.

Are all locksmith training course the same?

Definitely not, like most unregulated industries there is always someone trying to make some quick cash from it and locksmith training is no exception this is why there are an increasing number of online locksmith training courses available which consist of a selection of videos, manuals and how to guides, these courses are attractive because they make grandiose claims about massive potential earnings and cost a lot less than an actual hands on professional locksmith training course, but of course you get what you pay for and printed manuals and how to video do not make a professional locksmith.

What should you look for when hiring a locksmith?

Most untrained amateurs tout for the emergency call out work because they can simply turn up and break into your home or business with you footing the bill so if you want to avoid calling out one of theses ‘have a go’ locksmiths you need to be careful who you contact.

When locked out of their home or business everyone these day turns to the internet and simply does a search on their smartphone for ‘locksmith’ or ’emergency locksmith’, your phone knows your location for add you town or city doesn’t matter.      

Now you’ll be surprised at how many results actually show up all claiming to be the local locksmith for that area even if you live a small town or village, surely there aren’t so many local locksmiths working in such a small area? Nobody would make any money! No there are not and this is why you need to be careful who you click on so you don’t end up calling out a complete amateur or worse still an extortionate locksmith call centre.

You need to be looking for a genuine independent, local locksmith where the website has a local address and a local phone number and avoid the large so called national locksmith companies, which aren’t national locksmith companies at all they are simply call centres who act as a middle man and send out the nearest local locksmith on their books, but there is problem with this business model because these call centres will tout for work in every city, town and village in the UK whether they have locksmith is that area or not and people have reported waiting more that 6 hours for a locksmith to arrive, not only that but these call centres tend to attract the” have a go” amateurs who struggle to get their own work due to bad local feedback and lack of skill. However the worse thing is the price because these call centre need to take their cut, the locksmith wants his cut and has sometimes travelled hundreds of miles so want compensation for that too so fees from theses call centres can be more that 5 times the goings rate with many horror stories emerging online where some vulnerable person, usually the elderly has been charged £300-£400 for a job a local independent locksmith would have charged no more than £80 for…

In summary, not all locksmiths are created equal, there are professionals, amateurs and over priced call centres so at the end of the day taking an extra minute or two to look over a locksmiths website and verify that they are in fact a genuine, independent locksmith will save you a lot of heartache and money in the long run.