Inherited or Foreclosed Home: What to Do About the Locks

By Ray Delgado, Sacramento Field Locksmith · Published July 30, 2026

A woman in Tahoe Park called me in March about her mother's house. Mum had passed in November, the place had been empty since, and the daughter had just been appointed by the court. She had one key. What she did not have was any idea who else did.

We went through it on the porch. A cleaning lady from years back. The neighbour who watered plants. A grandson who "borrowed" one during a hospital stay in 2019 and never gave it back. A contractor from a bathroom job. That is five keys in circulation on a house standing empty, and it is a completely normal count.

Houses that sit empty after a death or a foreclosure are a specific kind of job, and the locks are usually the easy part. The part people get wrong is the order they do things in.

First question: do you actually have the authority?

This is where I have to turn work down, and it comes up more than you would think.

Being the deceased person's child does not by itself give you the right to change the locks. Authority comes from a document. Either the court has appointed you as personal representative and you have Letters, or the property was in a living trust and you are the successor trustee, or title has already transferred and your name is on the recorded deed. The California Courts self-help probate pages lay out which situation you are in and what it takes to get there.

Any decent locksmith will ask to see something. If someone works on a house purely because the caller says it is theirs, that tells you what standard they hold themselves to. For what it is worth, California licenses locksmiths through the Bureau of Security and Investigative Services, and the licence number belongs on the van, the invoice and the website. Verifying it takes a minute.

On foreclosure purchases the document is the trustee's deed upon sale. Bring it. I have been called out to properties where the buyer had won at auction but the sale had not recorded yet, and that is not a house anyone should be drilling into.

The line you must not cross

If a person is living in the house, you cannot lock them out. Not the heirs, not the new owner, not me.

California treats a self-help lockout as a serious matter. Civil Code §789.3 prohibits changing the locks, cutting utilities or removing doors to force an occupant out, and it attaches statutory damages plus the occupant's legal costs. Removing somebody lawfully means an unlawful detainer through the court, however unwelcome that answer is when you are paying the mortgage on a house you cannot enter.

Foreclosure buyers hit a second layer. Tenants who were renting from the previous owner do not simply lose their tenancy at the auction. Under Code of Civil Procedure §1161b most of them are entitled to ninety days' written notice, and a fixed-term lease can survive longer than that.

Squatters are their own category and the distinction is legally messy. Someone who has been there long enough to receive mail and can produce anything resembling an agreement is going to be treated as an occupant, not a trespasser, and the sheriff will tell you to go to court. I have watched owners lose months by getting this wrong at the start.

So the honest sequence is: confirm the house is empty, then call me. Not the other way round.

What the job usually looks like

For a vacant single-storey house in Sacramento with the typical three exterior doors, rekeying all of them to one new key runs about $135 to $210 all in: $25 to $50 a lock plus the service call. That covers every key anyone has ever held, and it takes under an hour.

Replacement makes sense when the hardware has actually failed, and on long-empty houses it sometimes has. Sun-baked brass on a south-facing door, a deadbolt that has not been turned since 2019 and grinds, a knob lock on a door that should carry a deadbolt at all. Budget $150 to $250 per door installed with hardware worth having.

On these jobs I push people toward a Grade 1 or Grade 2 deadbolt on the main entry, using the BHMA grading standard rather than the packaging. An empty house is watched. Grade 3 builder hardware is the stuff that gets kicked through, and the difference in price on one door is around forty dollars.

The rest of the vacant-house list

While I am there I check the things that matter more than the front door lock, because empty houses get entered through the boring openings.

• The garage side door. Almost always the weakest point in the house, and almost always forgotten. Half the ones I see still have the original 1970s knob lock.
• The sliding door. A bar in the track costs fifteen dollars and defeats the lift-and-shove that gets most of them open.
• Window latches on the ground floor. Empty houses sit for months. One unlatched bathroom window is the whole plan.
• The lockbox. If a realtor, cleaner or contractor ever hung one, it is probably still there with a code that four people know.
• Mail. Not a lock, but a stuffed mailbox is a sign in the yard saying nobody is home. Forward it.

None of this is expensive. It is the difference between a house that gets left alone and one that gets tried.

When the locks are the smallest problem

I should be straight about something, because it comes up on maybe a third of these calls.

Sometimes I finish the rekey and the owner is standing in a kitchen that has not been touched since the Clinton administration, holding a key to a house they live four hundred miles from, doing arithmetic on a roof they have not looked at yet. The locks were never the actual question. The question is what happens to the house.

If the plan is to clean it out, fix it up and list it, good. Get the property tax situation checked first, because Proposition 19 reassesses most inherited homes to current market value and the annual bill can multiply while everyone is still deciding. The Sacramento County assessor's office will tell you the number.

If the plan is that there is no plan, and the honest position is that nobody in the family wants to manage a renovation from another state, then it is worth getting an as-is number alongside the retail one before committing to months of work. Local cash buyers like Pacific Home Buyers will quote on a house in whatever condition it is standing in, contents included, which at least turns a vague problem into two comparable numbers. Plenty of people run that comparison and go the listing route anyway. That is fine. The point is running it.

Either way, change the locks first. The house is yours to decide about, and it should not also be five other people's.

Questions I get on these jobs

Straight answers to the ones that come up every time.

Can I change the locks on my late parent's house before probate finishes?

If the court has appointed you personal representative, yes — bring your Letters. If probate has not started and the house was not in a trust, nobody has legal authority over the property yet, and a locksmith who works on it anyway is exposing you both.

The house I bought at the trustee sale still has people in it. Can you rekey it?

Not while they are living there. California requires an unlawful detainer to remove occupants, and tenants of the former owner are usually entitled to ninety days' notice first. Once the house is legally empty, it is a one-hour job.

How much to rekey a whole vacant house in Sacramento?

Around $135 to $210 for a typical three-door house — $25 to $50 per lock plus the service call. Replacement runs $150 to $250 per door if the hardware itself has given up.

Do I need to replace the locks or is rekeying enough?

Rekeying is enough whenever the hardware is sound and the problem is simply that unknown people hold keys, which describes almost every inherited house. Replace when the lock is worn, corroded, or the wrong grade for an entry door.

What about the garage and the sliding door?

Those are where empty houses actually get entered. A garage side door usually needs a proper deadbolt, and a sliding door needs a track bar. Both are cheap and both matter more than the front door on a vacant property.