Orihuela Costa has no high street. Its shops, bars, estate agents and offices sit in commercial centres instead: the Via Park centres near Los Altos, the long run of units in Playa Flamenca, and La Zenia Boulevard, the largest shopping centre in the province of Alicante. Units change hands often, and every new tenant gets the same thing on the day the lease is signed: a bunch of keys, with no list of who else has copies.
Here is how to sort out the locks before your first day of trading.
Step one: list every door you will be responsible for
Walk the unit with the lease in your hand and note each door and what it opens:
- the shopfront, usually aluminium and glass with a cylinder and a deadlock;
- any roller shutter and its lock;
- the back or service door, often onto a corridor or a delivery yard;
- internal doors: office, stockroom, toilets, the cupboard with the electrics;
- a safe, if one was left.
Step two: separate yours from the landlord’s and the centre’s
In a managed commercial centre, some doors are not yours to change even if they lead into your unit: service corridors, shared fire exits, doors onto communal areas. The centre’s management may hold master keys for them, for good reasons. Ask before you touch any of these, and get the answer in writing.
The lease should also say whether you may change the locks on your own doors, and whether the landlord expects a key. Most expect to be told, not to be asked.
Step three: change what you can, before you stock it
You do not know how many keys the last tenant had cut, how many staff carried them, or whether an agent kept one from the viewings. Changing the cylinders on the doors you control resets that to the keys in your hand. Do it before the stock arrives, not after.
If several doors are used by the same people, ask for cylinders that work on one key. Fewer keys means fewer lost keys.
Step four: count the keys and write it down
Keep a simple list: which key opens which door, how many there are, who holds each one and since when. At the end of the summer season, when staff leave, that list tells you exactly which cylinders to change.
The back door matters most
The shopfront is in full view of the car park; the service door is not. It is often the one forced first, and the one nobody checks at closing. A good cylinder, a keep that is properly fixed into the frame and a closer that actually pulls the door shut are worth more than any alarm sign.
When it becomes a job for a locksmith
Changing cylinders is quick, planned work, best booked before opening or after closing. It is covered under commercial locksmith work in Orihuela Costa, and so is an invoice in the business name for your accounts. If the unit is broken into, the order of events in the hours after a break-in applies to a shop as much as to a house, and the burglary repair page covers the door. Seasonal businesses will recognise the September key count from what a summer of guests does to a lock.