For anyone who loses their protected/secure keys to their apartment building in Switzerland:
In most cases when this happens, your landlord or regie/verwaltung will charge you a very significant fee, often going into four figures, to replace not just your key but the locks in the building - and in some cases all the key copies for your neighbours. These secure keys cannot be copied in Swiss key shops, as they will refuse and/or not have access to the blanks.
There have been posts on this forum suggesting that you can get these keys copied in France or Italy, so when I recently lost a Kaba Star key (as in the attached photo) I decided to test if the same was the case in the UK. A planned trip to London offered the opportunity and I can report that yes, the shop did the job without questions. £15 per key certainly beat CHF 1,000 or more...
There's nothing special about a key, it's just bit of metal of the right shape.
If the key has a chip with a number, and the number of the chip needs to be registered with the system controller (like car keys), then it's a bit more difficult.
The serial numbers on the key just tracks if it needs approval before copies are made... if the person making the copy follows the rules.
Our key has the same - a serial number on the other side.
I believe Kaba has a more secure system, and that there is another brand "Keso" where the distribution of the blanks is more restricted...but since the Kaba Star keys are very common in Switzerland I thought this was useful info
Quite. When the time comes to vacate our apartment, the proof of the pudding will be in whether the regie notices that our UK copy has no serial number on it...
To state the obvious, the reason is to ensured that your lost key cannot be used to break into the building.... it is not just about the cost of cutting the key.
They have returned dropped keys twice...over 10 years... and I always make sure there is one on any keys we lend to guests - not because we think they are likely to lose the key, but to give reassurance that if they do, it will be returned...
If you lose your key with no identifying info on or with it, the landlord normally just charges you for the replacement key. Had to sort out my boss’ key a couple of years ago and that was the first thing the landlord asked me. Same thing for one of our neighbours; dropped his keys out of his pocket and just got charged for the replacement.
Where did you manage to get this cut? The place I tried in London told me that I needed paper work. Not sure if that’s because supposedly we have the most recent and the most secure system... KABA STAR PAT or something like that...
Just to clarify, if what you're after is an extra set of keys, you can usually request these from your landlord and the price is "reasonable" by Swiss standards, about CHF40 a key.
The reason it is so expensive when you lose a key is that the whole building is coded to allow passage through common areas by all keyholders, so when a key goes missing, they need to re-key the whole building.
FYI, your household insurance normally covers the cost of a lost key and the eventual replacement of the locks.
In my case I cannot. I have one key for Garage, but I wanted to have second one to have one with each car key... My Verwaltung told me 'one parking spot - one key - no way to get second one'.
Just to offer another anecdotal data point, my friend got charged close to 600 CHF when I lost their key (lent to me for watering the plants). Lost on the other side of town, no idetifying information, but they insisted on changing the locks.
They could have just rekeyed the friend's lock, but no, I guess they considered me a shifty criminal. Sure, I could still have got into the building's wash room or cellar or whatever. Grr.
Liability insurance covers this kind of thing, BTW, but there's still a stiff deductible.