Smart Home

What is a Smart Home?

In short, a Smart Home is a living space equipped with programmable devices and sensors that enable different kinds of automation for comfort, convenience, monitoring, energy efficiency, security, and more.

Of course, some technology can be pretty old and not precisely thought about as smart technology, like thermostats controlling radiators. But now, the home spaces are invaded with the latest consumer tech—voice-controlled speakers, app-controlled locks and lights, sensors that monitor different environmental variables, connected appliances, and so on.

This is also the environment where Sensative in 2015 launched our first product, the groundbreaking Strips Guard.

The Smart Home market

Traditionally, Smart Home has been a hobbyist consumer market for people that builds their solutions from components and products available in electronics stores and programs everything themselves.

However, Smart Home is rapidly becoming a commodity mass market where tenants or property buyers require smart features, smart locks, automation, and more. This change opens new opportunities for property managers as well as service providers.

According to MarketsandMarkets, the smart home market is projected to grow from USD 84.5 billion in 2021 to USD 138.9 billion by 2026. However, fragmentation and compatibility issues between various devices, technologies, and suppliers are a challenge for the growth of this market.

Sensative provides IoT products for all these Smart Home actors, mainly our sensors in the discreet iconic Strips form factor. For larger professional organizations, we also offer the Yggio DiMS platform.

Homeowners

Technology is reinventing the living experience and what we expect from our homes. These inventions can perform different tasks based on presence, behavior, or voice recognition for the residents’ convenience, comfort, safety, and utilities spend.

Many homeowners look beyond convenience functions like automatic lighting and invest to save money. Detailed real-time control of lighting, heating, and ventilation can reduce the energy spend by 50%. Water leak detection saves money on water waste detection and limits the damages from a possible broken pipe. (whitepaper)

Another popular area is home security, both for your family and property safety, and to reduce insurance costs by showing insurance companies that you prioritize home safety. Some insurance companies will reduce premiums by almost 20% for homes that have home automated security systems installed.

Despite the many possibilities of today’s smart homes, it’s still just in its infancy compared to the infinite potential of this technology.

Property owners

Leading rental property owners are investing in IoT technologies at an increasing rate. Some business drivers:

Save on labor costs by installing, for instance, remote-controlled thermostats and water leak sensors that monitor equipment in apartments in real-time without the need for manual inspections on-site.
Research shows that more than 60% of people said they would be encouraged to be more energy-efficient if they could understand how much their daily energy use was costing them.
A recent study revealed that 57% of renters (86% of millennials!) would pay at least $20 more per month for Smart Home features like smart locks and lights and energy-efficient thermostats.
Smart Homes attract new tenants and reduce churn, driving down vacancy rates. Smart apartment properties have a 59% increase in renewal rates over those that ignore this technology.
Reduce high costs of vacancy by controlling heating, cooling, and other utility costs. Analysts find that properties can reduce utility costs for empty spaces by 18% or more.

Service providers

The Smart Home service provider capitalizes on homeowners and property owners who lack competence or want the convenience of subscription-based turn-key solutions. The products and solutions they provide are the latest and greatest, and the subscription models are often mimicking the proven models of the Home Alarm industry.

One of the challenges is that the systems they provide are usually from a single standard, like Z-Wave, ZigBee, or WiFi. This results in a lock-in effect where the homeowner or property owner is limited when extending the system to products that support this standard. A typical example is the earlier installed door lock communicating on, e.g., Bluetooth, and the smart lighting system is ZigBee-based. Then you cannot automatically turn on the light when unlocking the door, not until you install a gateway product that can handle automation across both standards.

If you opt to use a Service provider, then select one that can provide open solutions. If you are a Service provider, see that your offering provides the extendability, flexibility, and openness necessary to be future-proof.