The following is a guest post from Danny Hertzberg with Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate in Miami Beach, FL who’s a member of the #1 team in the country, The Jills®.
Last week, from January 5-8th, the world’s greatest conference for consumer technology took place in Las Vegas– the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
For the last 50 years, the annual CES has been shaping the way technology penetrates the marketplace and arrives in the homes of consumers around the world. Since the first show took place in 1967, exhibiting radios and black and white televisions, it has been an unparalleled gateway for new technology.
As we emerged into the new millennium, big and small companies alike began bringing more groundbreaking ideas to the show floor. Jaw-dropping technology like self-driving cars, drones, virtual reality, 3D printing, robots, and much, much more are now becoming part of today’s world!
Practically anything that has to do with our everyday lives such as sleeping, fitness, babies, homes, education, beauty, energy, sports, you name it, is undergoing some serious technological advances.
One of the most exciting spaces of innovation is smart home technology. Evolving alongside the expansion of mobile devices and tablets, the number of smart homes is increasing on a daily basis.
This year, I was honored to have had the opportunity to speak on the panel, ‘The Business of Creating Smart Homes’ with Lindsey Turrentine, Bob Burns, Jeff Lyman, and moderated by Coldwell Banker CMO, Sean Blankenship. We discussed many trends and aspects of smart home tech.
As the connectivity amongst devices accelerates, the collective technology that links them also gets exponentially more sophisticated. The Internet of Things, or the network connection between smart devices, has made it easier than ever to install smart home technology and control it remotely from your cellphone.
Of the many benefits that arise from smarter homes, the one that sparks the most interest to consumers is security. Once connected to your home’s Wi-Fi, you can hook up security cameras, motion detectors, door locks, window sensors, burglar alarms, smoke detectors, and so forth to your mobile device and communicate with them via an app.
From the app on your cellphone, you can activate or deactivate your smart home’s components, you can set guidelines such that when the smoke detector goes off it triggers the door to unlock, and you can receive immediate push notifications when the burglar alarm goes off.
However, security isn’t the only added bonus to investing in smart home technology. Convenience is also a major factor in attracting consumers into making the switch. Being able to turn off all your lights when you’ve already left your home, turn on the A/C before your get back, close the shades from another city, or play music from any room in the house are all reasons that can help you save time and money.
The best part of making your home more intelligent is that you can do it incrementally, one device at a time. While comprehensive systems that link nearly every device in the market do exist, more affordable, DIY options are also quite promising. You are in complete control of how intricate you want your smart home ecosystem to be and can gradually add on to it at your own pace.
During the panel we discussed the recent launch of the Coldwell Banker Smart Home Staging Kit which allows sellers to enhance their homes and meet the guidelines of the smart home definition. The kit includes Nest, August and Lutron products. The majority of home buyers want move in ready homes and over a 1/3 of Americans now associate smart home technology with a move in ready home.
During the panel much of the discussion focused on voice control and the future trends related to voice activation. The industry leader in voice control is Amazon Echo, a smart speaker that has multiple voice-activated features that let you control many of your smart home gadgets, among many other things, such as calling an Uber, buying things online, and obviously listening to music.
Kitchen appliances are also getting a major overhaul and are becoming more revolutionary than most of us could have ever dreamed of. Take the Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator, for example. It has a large touchscreen that lets you leave notes for your family members, check each other’s schedules, and watch TV. Even better, three interior cameras take snapshots of your fridge’s contents and email them to you, relieving you of all the guesswork when you’re at the store.
Cleaning your home has also gotten much more efficient as vacuum cleaning robots replace the tedious manual chore. Laundry monitors text you when your washing and drying machine cycles have ended. Even better, at this year’s CES, Whirpool announced that Amazon Echo will be compatible with its new appliances, allowing them to be controlled with voice requests. You will soon be able to ask, “Alexa, how much time is remaining in the wash cycle?” You will even be able to command your oven and refrigerator, simply by asking Alexa to do it for you.
I am so proud to see Coldwell Banker take the lead in the world of smart home technology. They sponsored the smart home marketplace, which provided an incredible platform of networking for consumers, industry leaders, and the media.
All in all, CES was a phenomenal success yet again, with over 100,000 people from all over the world and from a wide array of industries attending. I am so thrilled to see where technology takes us in the near future and I’m greatly looking forward to all of the fascinating innovations at the show next year!
You can contact Danny Hertzberg, of The Jills for all of your Miami real estate buying, renting and selling needs or read more of Danny’s take on how smart home tech is shaping real estate by clicking here.
