The Year of the Smart Home

The Year of the Smart Home

Sellers and builders are including smart home features as a bonus package for consumers’ real estate purchases. These features are replacing furnaces, alarm systems, doorbells, door locks, refrigerators, and more household items. In 2016 personal home assistance became more popular with the emergence of devices such as Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa. IHS Markit states that last year 80 million smart home devices were purchased worldwide. In 2017 it’s predicted that 130 million devices will be purchased.

2017 Smart Home Goals

This year tech companies are preparing many approaches to increase the consumers’ use of smart home devices. They plan to educate consumers on the benefits of having devices as well as how to use the technology. The initiative to decrease prices and make devices more affordable will, in return, make it more desirable to purchase multiple items for each room in the home. Companies are making efforts to improve the technology used to ensure that consumers are protected from being victim to cyber-attacks.

Many companies and even hotel chains are incorporating the idea of the smart home into their establishments. Hotels are making these same features accessible to all guests in every suite. Companies such as Comcast has reportedly been purchasing smaller tech companies to encourage new smart home innovations. Features of voice assist in a smart home is expected to incorporate its use with the smart car. Both will be synchronized to help consumers with many different functions when they are in their smart cars and away from their homes. One function is being able to control access to lights, TVs, and home security systems from the smart car.

There are still a lot of consumers that do not ask for the product when purchasing a home. Real estate agents are admitting that many consumers are not requesting special features especially when purchasing older homes. Whereas some simply expect the features to be included in the newer homes.