London, England -- (SBWIRE) -- 02/13/2012 -- There are literally hundreds of Locksmiths operating in and around London now and it has become more and more difficult to differentiate between them, which Locksmiths are local, have I called a locksmith or a national call centre? And if you are locked out the the last thing you want to do is trawl the Internet, you’ll just pick the first one that pops up after you have searched for Locksmith London. On the face of it most companies look the same, they all offer similar services and appear on google when you search for Locksmith London. You need to be careful though, I have been a Locksmith for over 15 years now and have attended a few jobs after another company has done work and was not impressed.

I attended one job in St Albans a few months ago, where a young lady had managed to lock herself out for the second time in the same evening! (I think alcohol may of played big part). A Locksmith Potters Bar had been there earlier and had opened her Yale Lock with a drill! and then replaced the lock with an expensive restricted key cylinder that only he could cut keys for, at a price of £45 each! I’m sure that any Locksmith reading this knows that more often than not you can open a Yale type lock quite easily without drilling. She then showed me the invoice that the last Locksmith had given her and I was shocked. The total bill came to just over £300! In all my years I have never charged any where near that for a lock out! I It was nearly midnight when I attended the job and my bill came to a quarter of that and I managed to get in without any damage! The lock was unnecessarily drilled so the Locksmith could make more money. I later found out that the same London Locksmith had been doing jobs like this all over London.

This is not uncommon as a lot of Locksmith companies in London you find on the Internet and in search results are often call centres which use an army of sub contractors. I did briefly work for such a company myself once, many years ago. The way they work is they will take out lots of advertising, do marketing campaigns and launch various websites: locksmith london .com, locksmith 24 hour london .com, 24 hour emergency locksmith london, etc. The they will then contact lots of local tradesman (not always Locksmiths) and offer them guaranteed work.

This sounded great to me at first, as I was just starting out, this is just what I needed. I was then told that out of every job they would take 60%, I thought this was a bit much considering I was doing all the work but I did a couple of jobs anyway. I worked out later that after I take the price of the parts out of my end I would be left with hardly anything, so I thought better of it and told them thanks but no thanks.

These type of companies may start of with good intentions, but by paying their engineers a percentage, they are the encouraging them to be dishonest. What this does is insentivise their sub contractors to charge more on every job, just so they can get a better cut. They may charge for unnecessary parts, drill open locks without trying other methods, or charge hourly rates while they go out and look for parts.

This means your bill could be highly inflated and you end up paying well over the odds. I would say that well over 50% of the companies you will now see come up on Internet search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo are all companies that operate in this way, any independent genuine Locksmith will tell you the same thing.

This is not an advert for my company in any way nor is it an attempt at getting business, its just my observations.

Now for the cheeky bit! however if you would like to book me or would like any advice, I operate through out London, South Herts and Middlesex and my company is called Abbey Locksmiths, you can get me on: 07779 798 689 or 0800 052 0775 or check out my website: http://www.abbeylocks.co.uk for a local London Locksmith