Builders get ahead of smart homes trend
Ottawa builders are getting ahead of the connected-home trend, Tracey Lindeman writes.
Imagine having a home that really knows you.
It opens the front door and turns on the porch light when you approach at the end of a long work day. It knows exactly how low to turn the lights when you’re getting ready to snuggle up and watch some Netflix. It can tell you the weather and traffic when you wake up in the morning, and remind you about your kid’s swim lessons at night.
Maybe you sleep better in a cold home? It can adjust your thermostats automatically based on time of day. When you’re out of town, it can monitor for water leaks, let you check on your house remotely via a security system linked to your smartphone and even automatically turn lights on and off to make it look like someone’s home when you’re on a beach 2,000 kilometres away.
If all this sounds like music to your ears, you should know that having a smart home is already within your grasp — no assembly required.
In Ottawa, real-estate developer eQ Homes pivoted its 10-year-old business to exclusively build connected homes at the start of 2017. The company has seven communities in development, from downtown Ottawa’s Greystone Village to its Manotick bungalows.
“I’m not going to say someone’s purchased a house from us because of that, but there’s a whole bunch of different decisions (that go into buying a house),” says Tobin Kardish, marketing manager for eQ Homes.
“You could be looking at us versus builder X and Y. People shop by square footages, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, certain things like, is there hardwood or granite countertops? Let’s say everything is equal. You might be leaning towards us a little bit more because we offer these things standard in the house that you don’t have to buy after the fact.”
Those standard things include a Nest smart thermostat, a smart hub that builds a network between multiple devices, as well as automated lighting by Lutron. For an additional cost, home buyers can upgrade to include a smart garagedoor opener and front-door lock, a smart water shut-off valve and additional lighting options. The most expensive upgrade package offered by eQ Homes is $6,950 plus HST — a relative drop in the bucket when you’re paying $300,000-plus for a new home.
“The nice part is, you wrap it into your mortgage,” Kardish says.
Connectivity is even more of a differentiating factor in the highend housing market. Roberto Campagna, owner and president of luxury-home company Roca Homes, says he fielded his first smart-home request around 2010. It began with automated shades and drapes for his homes’ typically large windows and evolved from there.
Now, he says between 70 and 80 per cent of his homes involve some connected element, whether it’s audio, video, security, lighting or HVAC. “Our approach is holistic. How do we want to complement the overall design?” he says.
The allure of such technology is that it’s intended to lend a sleek, discreetly functional and almost futuristic esthetic to a home. In large, well-appointed rooms, the uncluttered look is even more important, Campagna says. For example, a room with multiple lights usually means multiple light switches. “With home automation, you can condense that all into one switch,” he says.
CANADIANS ARE INTERESTED, BUT WE’RE SLOW TO GET SMART
Most Canadians have a cautious curiosity about connected homes. Though the majority of Canadians don’t have smart homes right now, a report by Nielsen last year said 46 per cent of Canadians intended to buy smart-home devices by the end of 2018.
Whether they actually get on board remains to be seen. Nielsen also reported that barriers to adoption — namely, that people are either fine with the status quo of their so-called dumb homes, or that they didn’t understand the value and operation of smarthome technology — are causing the market to develop slowly.
And, as consulting firm McKinsey wrote in its There’s No Place Like (A Connected) Home report: “Despite the proliferation of devices, we’re still far from the vision of seamlessly connected homes.” The compatibility and interoperability of different brands’ devices is still a work in progress.
But Amazon’s Echo — often referred to as Alexa, the name of the device’s virtual assistant — could be the game-changer.
Owners can issue voice commands to Alexa — to order a pizza, hail an Uber, play a Spotify playlist, tell them the weather — and can also pair other connected devices with the Echo to create a smarthome network.
At $100 in the U.S., the offthe-shelf, easy-to-use smart speaker is designed to make people familiar and comfortable with the idea of a smart home. And it seems to be working. Amazon sold 11 million Echos in the U.S. last year, and marketresearch company Forrester estimates that figure will double by the end of this year. (Canadian sales figures aren’t known because the device isn’t sold in Canada, though many crafty Canadians have already acquired one.)
According to Forbes, Amazon Prime membership — which Amazon has aggressively rolled out in Canada in the past year — is seen as a key driver for the Echo’s success in the U.S.
Additionally, Alexa and its rival smart-home assistant Google Home may become more integrated into our homes whether we like it or not, mostly via third-party partnerships. For instance, audio company Sonos recently launched its new One speaker, which has Alexa built into it. (This functionality isn’t currently supported in Canada, but the company says it’s coming.)
Once you’ve got a smart speaker and a hub, half the battle has been won. In the U.S., smart-home adoption is expected to double to 20.5 per cent by 2022, according to research company Statista. If previous tech trends are any indication, Canada will likely follow the U.S.’s example in smart-home adoption.
HACKS POSSIBLE, BUT NOT LIKELY (FOR NOW)
Security is an ongoing concern when anything is online. Most connected devices use Wi-Fi to operate — hence the name connected device. However, Wi-Fi routers can be hacked, exposing devices connected to them.
Doug Barclay, owner of Ottawabased installer Home Plus Automation, says a majority of his customers ask for home-security technology like cameras and motion sensors, but are sometimes unaware of how connected devices can open them up to digital risks.
“They’ll spend thousands of dollars on a system, then use the $90 router they got from Best Buy,” he says. “I really try to stress, ‘I don’t want to be automating your home and then opening it up for (people to access).’”
That said, the threat of smarthome hacking may be scary, but it isn’t terribly common right now. Most malicious hacking can be avoided by using good online practices, such as regularly resetting account and router passwords, and not clicking on suspicious links.
These are sensible practices, whether you’ve bought a $100 Echo or a $20,000 automation system. Luckily, the smart home is not an all-or-nothing proposition: Consumers have the choice to pick the most suitable and secure products for them, adding and subtracting them from their home network according to their needs.
For Barclay, a software developer by profession who began exploring home automation in 2000, the trade-off between convenience, security and automation is worth it.
“Once you’ve got it,” he says, “you can’t live without it.”