Smart lock installation in Liverpool

Liverpool has an enormous stock of large Victorian and Georgian townhouses, and a lot of them were subdivided into flats decades ago — Toxteth, Kensington, Wavertree, Anfield, and most of the roads around Sefton Park.

The important part is that the front door of those buildings is a domestic front door doing a communal job. It was designed for one household and now serves four or six, with everybody coming and going at different hours. It gets ten times the use it was built for, and it usually shows.

Where a building has been converted, the shared entrance often belongs to nobody in particular. There may be a freeholder who is hard to reach, a managing agent who only handles some of the flats, or four leaseholders who have never all agreed on anything.

That is worth untangling before you buy a lock. A smart lock on your own flat door is nearly always straightforward. The shared door is a conversation with the other owners, and we will tell you honestly whether it is worth having.

Where the other residents are up for it, a code system on the shared door usually ends the perpetual argument about who has lent a key to whom.

Around Smithdown Road, Kensington and the Georgian quarter, a large share of that converted stock is let to students, and the whole cohort changes in the same fortnight each summer.

Codes suit that far better than keys. Nobody is cutting sets in August, and access ends on the tenancy date whether or not anybody remembered to collect anything.

Merseyside is outside Greater Manchester but well within our normal working area — under an hour on the M62. There is no travel charge; we simply prefer to group jobs across the water into the same day where we can, so if you have more than one property it is worth saying so.