What Burglars Look for Front Door | Read Yours First

Most burglaries in the north-east are decided in under thirty seconds. Not inside the house. Outside it, on the pavement, while someone walks past with their hands in their pockets and their eyes doing something very specific.

They're not looking for an alarm box. They're not checking whether you've got a dog. They're reading your door the way a mechanic reads an engine: quickly, systematically, looking for the part most likely to fail.

What follows is that same read-through, applied to your own property. Work through it yourself, ideally standing on the pavement looking back at your house. If you're a landlord in Millfield or Hendon with a row of terraces, walk the whole row.

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The cylinder: the thing that tells them the most

On a uPVC or composite door, the euro cylinder is the lock. It's also the part most people ignore entirely, because it's flush with the lockcase and easy to overlook. But to anyone who knows what they're looking at, it broadcasts information immediately.

How much does it stick out?

Measure from the face of the door to the outermost point of the cylinder. More than 3mm proud of the escutcheon plate, and it's grippable with pliers. More than 5mm, and snapping it becomes straightforward with tools available from any builders' merchant. Snap the cylinder and the door opens. That's it. The rest of the multipoint lock is irrelevant.

A TS007 3-star cylinder (Avocet ABS, Ultion, Mul-T-Lock MT5+) is designed and tested specifically to resist snapping, drilling, picking, and extraction. It's rated by an independent body, not by the manufacturer's marketing department. The test involves a torque load that mimics the wrench-and-snap technique. If your cylinder doesn't have 3-star TS007 stamped on it, assume it won't survive that attack.

The fix is direct: replace the cylinder. An Ultion or Avocet ABS cylinder costs between £40 and £80 depending on size. Fitting takes twenty minutes. It's probably the single highest-value security spend available on a typical Sunderland terrace.

Does it have a thumbturn on the inside?

Lots of cylinders do. Convenient for keyless exit, which matters if you've got elderly relatives or young children. But if there's a letterbox within arm's reach of that thumbturn, you've got a problem. A tool called a letterbox fishing rod (sold openly online, regularly confiscated at crime scenes) can reach through the letterbox and rotate the thumbturn. Door opens from the inside. It's so common it has its own name: letterbox attack.

The fix is a letterbox cage or restrictor plate on the inside, which blocks the reach. Some composite doors come with them fitted. Most uPVC doors don't.

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The letterbox itself

While you're looking at it: is the letterbox centred in the door, or off to one side? Centre-fitted letterboxes on older uPVC doors in Pennywell, Southwick or Fulwell estates are often positioned close enough to the cylinder or the handle mechanism that a hooked rod can actuate either. The ideal letterbox is below waist height, horizontal, fitted with a draught excluder brush that impedes visibility, and well away from any mechanism.

If the letterbox is in a uPVC door more than fifteen years old, also check the door itself around the letterbox plate. Repeated flexing and weather cycling cracks the reinforcement around the aperture. Sometimes the plate wiggles. A plate that moves is a plate that can be worked.

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The handle and the keep

Grip your own front door handle and apply upward pressure. Then downward. Then pull it hard toward you. What moves?

On a multipoint lock, the handle drives the locking points into the frame keeps. If the handle has any vertical travel before those points engage, the mechanism is worn. On older GU, Fuhr, or Maco locksets, the spindle wears oval after years of use, which means the gearbox isn't fully engaging when you lift the handle. You think you've locked the door. You haven't fully.

The keeps themselves are worth a look. These are the metal receiver plates recessed into the door frame that the locking bolts, hooks, and rollers go into. On a timber frame they're often secured with short screws. On uPVC frames they're retained by the profile itself. Either way, if the door has dropped or the frame has moved (common in Edwardian and pre-war stock in Roker and Hendon), the keeps and the bolts may no longer be aligned. A door that's technically locked but whose bolts aren't fully home is effectively unlocked.

Close your door slowly and watch whether the bolt heads line up cleanly with the keeps. If they don't, that's a door adjustment or a keep reposition, not a full replacement job.

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Lighting, or rather the lack of it

A dark porch is an invitation. Not because burglars are afraid of light per se, but because working on a door in full visibility while a neighbour or passing car might see you is a different proposition from working in shadow for two uninterrupted minutes.

Bungalows and semis in Silksworth and Ryhope often have deep porches or recessed entries that kill ambient light entirely. Stand at your door at 9pm and see what's visible from the pavement. If you can barely see your own keyhole, nobody on the street can see anyone working at it either.

A PIR floodlight above the door costs between £25 and £60. Wired is better than battery (no replacement schedule, harder to defeat). Angled so it fires across the face of the door rather than straight down, it throws light onto any hands working at the lock.

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The side gate and the rear access question

Front doors take a lot of the security attention, but the actual point of entry in a significant proportion of residential burglaries is the rear. The front door check matters. So does answering this question honestly: how easy is it to reach your back door?

Walk your own side access. If there's a gate, test it. Is it bolted top and bottom? A single mid-height latch on a timber gate in a Sunderland terrace is two seconds of work with a hand through the gap. Both bolts should need a reaching arm, ideally one at each extreme of gate height.

Gate height matters too. Anything under 1.8m is scalable. Bins left against a wall or gate compound that. A 240-litre wheelie bin placed against a 1.6m gate is a step-stool. Check whether your own bins, recycling boxes or any garden furniture is visible from the front and positioned in a way that provides access upward or over.

This is genuinely how assessments work. Not abstract risk. Specific objects, specific heights, specific gaps.

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What the door frame tells them

The lock is often not the weakest point. The frame is.

Kick a door hard enough and the frame splits regardless of the lock quality. A multipoint lock distributes load across several points, which is why they're substantially better than a single deadbolt in terms of kick resistance. But a timber frame that's rotted at the base, or a uPVC frame whose reinforcing steel has corroded, doesn't give the lock anything to grip.

Press the frame around the striker plate on the inside edge of the door. Does it feel solid? Any flex, sponginess or visible gap between the frame and the surrounding brickwork is a structural concern. Silicone painted over a gap isn't structural. It's cosmetic.

On older terraced properties in Hendon, Pallion or Monkwearmouth you occasionally find the original timber frame still in situ behind a uPVC outer, with the uPVC door actually closing against timber that's been there since the 1930s. If that timber is soft to the thumb, a decent kick bypasses every lock entirely.

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Door type: what it signals

This is blunt, but it's how a quick street assessment works in practice.

Sold Secure and TS007 3-star aren't just marketing badges. They represent a testing regime: drilling resistance, pick resistance, snap resistance (TS007), and attack resistance across multiple vectors (SS312 Diamond). A cylinder without those ratings hasn't been tested to those standards. That's a fact, not a sales pitch.

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The doorstep: what's visible and what it implies

This last one feels small. It isn't.

A pile of post visible through the letterbox or on the step suggests nobody's home and nobody's been home. Milk still out at 2pm. A parcel left against the door. A recycling bin left at the kerb after collection day. These are timing signals, not security signals, but they inform the confidence calculation.

For landlords with HMO properties in SR4 or SR1: a shared door with multiple names on the buzzer panel and post overflowing from a communal letterbox reads as high-turnover, potentially poor interior security between units, and low chance of any individual tenant reacting to noise. It's a specific targeting risk.

None of this means you need to be obsessive. It means periodically checking whether your property looks like somewhere where security has been thought about, versus somewhere where it obviously hasn't.

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The full walkaround: checks to run now

Take five minutes. Do these in order.

• Cylinder protrusion. How far does it stick out? More than 3mm is a risk. Does it have a 3-star TS007 rating? If you're not sure, it probably doesn't.
• Letterbox position. Can you reach the thumbturn or handle mechanism from outside? Try it yourself, carefully.
• Handle play. Any vertical movement before locking points engage? Any wobble in the spindle?
• Frame condition. Press around the striker plate area. Any flex, rot or visible gap?
• Bolt alignment. Close the door slowly. Do the bolts seat cleanly in the keeps?
• Porch lighting. Stand at the door at dusk. Is it dark enough that nobody on the pavement could see hands working at the lock?
• Side gate. Bolted top and bottom? Gate height over 1.8m? Any climbable objects alongside it?
• Bin and furniture placement. Nothing adjacent to a gate or boundary wall that provides a step up.
• Visible post or parcels. Clear the step. Get a neighbour to take in deliveries if you're away.
• Door type and age. If the door is more than fifteen years old and you haven't had any security work done, it's worth a professional assessment.

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If you're in Sunderland and any of these checks throw up something you want a second opinion on, Locks Local covers all the SR postcodes. We're usually with you in under thirty minutes, and we'll tell you what we find honestly, including if there's nothing urgent to fix. Pricing is given on the call before we come out. No obligation to go further if the news is good.