Smart homes go mass market

Michael Rogers Columnist • Profile • E-mail

Technologists have long promised the smart home, with automated lighting and intelligent climate control, whole-house audio-video and similar digital luxuries. Yet these high-tech habitats have mostly remained the province of either gadget-happy do-it-yourselfers or multimillion-dollar custom homes. But last week about 150 homebuilders from around the United States gathered at a posh resort in northern San Diego county — a hotbed of suburban construction—for a digital home conference. These were, moreover, mass-market home builders — the big firms that build hundreds or thousands of new homes each year with prices in the $250,000-$800,000 range. 

Driving their interest isn’t so much technology — although that has indeed improved — as economics. As the recent housing boom slows down, new home builders need to find ways to compete with the used houses that are piling up on the market. Solution: the smart home.

“Digital features,” says Boyce Thompson, the editorial director of Hanley Wood, the building trade publisher that organized the conference, “are a big competitive advantage. Of the 8.2 million houses sold last year, seven million were existing homes with outmoded floor plans, obsolete home wiring and no home office space.” 

While it’s possible to retrofit an older home with digital bells and whistles, it’s far cheaper and easier to trick out a new home. When the walls are open, additional wiring is relatively inexpensive to add and other amenities — such as a killer home theater system — can be painlessly financed over a thirty-year mortgage. What makes this strategy even more appealing is that home builders are now courting a new generation of younger buyers who consider technology a natural part of their lives.

Builders are already moving in this direction. Nearly 50 percent of the new homes sold in the U.S. last year had “structured wiring” — usually several Cat-5 wires for data and two coaxial cables for video distribution (and some builders add additional wires for audio). Even though wireless distribution of data, audio and video is rapidly improving, most experts agree that homeowners are better off having wires in place if possible. Whatever wireless is able to do, wires can do better and more cheaply, with the added benefit that there is no radio interference to worry about as the home airspace fills up with other wireless signals.

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