Commercial Security Assessment
What a security assessment actually is
A commercial security assessment is a survey of a building’s physical openings and its key and credential systems, ending in a written document. It is not a sales visit with a clipboard, and the deliverable is not a quotation — one may follow, but the report stands on its own and is useful even if we never do another hour of work there.
It exists as a distinct service because most commercial buildings have never been looked at as a system. Hardware has been added, replaced and improvised by different people over many years, and nobody holds the overall picture. Facilities managers inherit buildings without documentation; new owners inherit them without keys. The assessment produces that picture: what is on every door, what condition it is in, who can open what, and what would fail if someone official walked through tomorrow. It is descriptive before prescriptive, because until the record exists nobody can set a budget.
Walking the building opening by opening
The method is unglamorous. We walk the property and treat every opening as its own item, in a fixed order so nothing is missed, and each gets an identifier and a location a technician who was not present can follow. Each door is operated rather than merely looked at, because a door that appears fine and does not latch when released is a finding that only shows up if someone lets it go.
Exterior doors come first, because they are the boundary — entrances, staff doors, service and delivery doors, roof access, mechanical rooms, gates and loading areas. Then interior controlled doors: tenant suites, stairwells, comms rooms, records storage, cash-handling areas, and any door meant to keep some employees out as well as the public.
The hardware inventory and its condition
For each opening we record what is fitted and its state: door and frame construction, the lockset or exit device, the cylinder, the strike, the closer, the hinges, any electrified components, and anything added over the years — surface bolts, hasps, padlocks, chains. The recurring findings are these:
- Doors that no longer latch, because the frame has moved, the closer is out of adjustment, or the strike has been filed to make an old problem go away.
- Closers disconnected or wedged so that a door people found heavy now stands open.
- Storefront doors racked in aluminium frames, where the deadlatch no longer meets the keeper.
- Exit devices with dogged latches, missing components or forcing damage.
- Cylinders that turn stiffly or are corroded, particularly on exterior doors near the coast.
- Padlocks and hasps standing in for a proper lock, and hinge screws stopping in trim rather than framing.
Fire-rated and labelled assemblies
A fire door is not a door — it is a listed assembly of slab, frame, hinges, closer, latching hardware and seals, and its rating depends on all of those being what the listing says. The label on the edge and frame is the record, and painting over labels or modifying the assembly without regard to it is common.
During the walk we identify which openings are labelled or appear to be part of a rated assembly, and record anything that would call the rating into question: holes cut into a rated slab, unlabelled substitute hardware, closers removed, latching hardware that no longer latches, coordinators missing, seals painted over.
We document observations; we do not issue determinations. Fire door assemblies are subject to periodic inspection under the standards that apply, and the authority having jurisdiction decides what is acceptable. The report puts the questionable openings in front of the owner in writing, before an inspector finds them.
Egress: the part that fails inspections
Egress problems are the most frequently found and the most improvised. The pattern is consistent: someone has a legitimate worry about a door, solves it with a padlock or a chain, and creates an exit people cannot get out of quickly.
What gets checked includes whether exit doors release with a single motion in the direction of travel and without a key or tool; whether panic hardware operates freely and latches when released; whether stair and corridor doors latch positively; and whether anything obstructs an exit route.
These findings are recorded plainly, because they carry two exposures. One is life safety, which is why the rules exist. The other is commercial: a failed inspection can bring correction orders and in some cases a stop to occupancy, and an insurer reviewing a claim will ask whether exits were compliant on the day. Correcting a chained rear exit before an inspection is a small item; correcting it under an order is not.
Auditing the keys
The key audit produces the uncomfortable conversation, because most buildings cannot answer the basic questions. How many keys exist for each door. Who holds them. How many are unaccounted for — former employees, tenants and contractors, the box nobody can attribute. Whether the keys are restricted or freely copyable. Whether the master key system, if there is one, is still coherent.
That last point is the common failure in older buildings. The hierarchy has decayed as doors were rekeyed piecemeal, each time by whoever was available. The master no longer opens everything it should, several suites sit on unrelated keyways, and the person who understood it retired. The assessment establishes what is left, which is the prerequisite for deciding whether to restore the system or plan a new one — and where a fresh start is the answer, the scope becomes a lock rekey project with a defined order of doors rather than an open-ended expense.
Credentials and access control review
Where a building has electronic access control, the credential list is audited in the same spirit, with the owner’s authorisation and their administrator present. The question is simple and the answer frequently unwelcome: who is still active who should not be. Terminated employees whose cards were never disabled, contractors from a finished project, vendor accounts left in place after installation, shared logins, and credentials for areas nobody can justify. Alongside that we check whether schedules and door groups still reflect how the building is used, and whether anyone reviews the logs.
An access control system is only as current as its administration, and administration is what lapses. The output is a list the owner can act on immediately, and where the system is at the end of its life, that is stated so it can be planned rather than discovered during an incident. Remediation is ordinary access control work.
The report, and why doing this first is cheaper
The deliverable is a written document. It contains the opening-by-opening inventory with location, hardware and condition; the fire and egress observations; the key audit and the state of any master system; the credential findings; and a prioritised list of recommendations split into what affects life safety or code exposure, what affects security materially, and what is schedulable maintenance.
It is written for people who were not on the walk. A facilities manager should be able to budget from it line by line; a finance director should see what is urgent and what can wait. It can be handed to an insurer, a landlord or an incoming management company as a factual statement of what is on the property, and it is the baseline the next survey is measured against.
The economic argument for doing this before something happens is straightforward. Work done on a schedule is batched into efficient visits and paid from a planned budget. The same work after a break-in or a failed inspection is done at short notice, one door at a time, at whatever it costs that day — alongside the loss itself, the interruption to trading and, after an inspection failure, a correction order with a deadline.
An assessment is the starting point for any building whose owner is not sure what they have. It sits ahead of the rest of our commercial locksmith work, and it is why we can quote accurately afterwards instead of guessing. Where an unsecured opening is found on the walk that cannot safely be left, it is dealt with straight away, as with any emergency locksmith call. We work across the counties on our service areas page.
Pro Locksmith Fort Lauderdale is licensed and insured and carries out commercial security assessments in Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties. Call (954) 406-8266.