Villas and urbanisations
Your key holder has moved back to the UK: re-securing the villa
Xàbia is home to people of 85 nationalities. On the INE census of 1 January 2025, 29.8 % of the town’s registered residents held a foreign nationality, and British nationals alone were 14.8 %, about 4,550 people. Add the owners of second homes who are not on the register at all, and a very large share of the villas on the urbanisations belong to people who are not in Xàbia for much of the year.
That arrangement runs on trust. Somebody nearby keeps a key: a neighbour, a friend from the same street, a retired couple who check the house after storms and let in the pool man. For years it works.
Then the neighbour sells up and goes back to the UK.
Where did the key go?
Usually, nowhere bad. It went back to you by post, or to the buyer of their house, or into a drawer in a removal box. The point is that you no longer know, and neither does anyone else. Add the other keys a villa collects over the years:
- the cleaner, past and present;
- the pool and garden services;
- the agent who handled a sale or a let;
- builders who worked on the house;
- family who stayed one summer.
Each of those keys opens the same cylinder.
The case for changing it now
Changing a cylinder is a short job on most doors, and it resets the count to zero: every key that exists afterwards came out of a sealed pack, and you know where each one is. It is cheaper than a door, and far cheaper than wondering.
The same goes for any other lock on the same keys: a side door, the garage, the pool room, sometimes the garden gate. Those are covered on the villa page.
Changing the cylinders without flying out
You do not have to be there.
- Send photos of each cylinder (outside and the edge of the open door) by WhatsApp or email.
- Agree the price in writing before a date is set.
- Name the person who opens up: your new key holder, a property manager, a cleaner you trust.
- The new keys are counted out to that person, and photos of the finished doors are sent to you.
Choose the new key holder before the work, not after: the fewer hands the new keys pass through, the longer the count stays at zero.
And while you are at it
A villa that stands empty is the kind of house the latch-slipping burglaries of 2024 and 2025 targeted. If the new key holder will be letting people in and out, make sure everyone locks with the key rather than pulling the door shut. Owners who let the villa to guests sometimes skip keys altogether: keypad entry for a Xàbia holiday let sets out what to check first.