Editor's Note: Leveraging the Smart Home
For those of you who have focused on residential security, you are definitely feeling the impact if home automation on your market. The so-called “smart home” is gaining so much steam that it is drawing new, powerful competitors into the home security market (check out www.securityinfowatch.com/11434134 to get an inside look at one of the newest, AT&T). Still, with so much enhancement coming to our homes, there seems to be plenty of room on the bandwagon for everybody willing to embrace the change.
But what may be the most important part of the home automation explosion is the backbone that powers it all — security of course!
New research from connected home vendor iControl Networks demonstrates the importance of security to smart home adoption, with more than two-thirds of consumers (67%) ranking personal and family security as the number-one reason for using a smart home system, and 100 percent of consumers responding that security is a must-have in a home automation system.
As your sales team is pitching home security to residential clients, some of the insights from the iControl 2014 State of the Smart Home Report could prove very handy. At the very least, it’s a list of potential bells and whistles that might be just the thing to push a sales proposal over the top, but also it could be an indicator of services and technologies that home security consumers will come to expect from their alarm providers in the coming years.
“Research like this helps us really understand consumers’ smart home preferences and expectations for the future,” Greg Roberts, vice president of marketing for iControl Networks, said in a statement. “It is an opportune time for companies bringing connected solutions to market.”
The survey of more than 900 U.S. adults is available at www.icontrol.com. Some of the significant findings:
• 86% ranked property loss protection as a top reason for a smart home system.
• 78% ranked energy management as one of the features that matter most in the smart home.
• 52% of pet owners listed pet monitoring as a top-five reason for using a smart home service.
• 29% said entertainment and the ability to remotely control and/or automate home entertainment systems as a top-five feature of a smart home.
• 18% would be more likely to leave kids at home unsupervised at a younger age if they had live video feed and could automate home functions.
• 51% would pay up to $500 more for a fully-equipped smart home, and 32% would pay between $500 and $3,000.
Next Month in SD&I
I am really excited about bringing you next month’s issue of SD&I! We are calling it “the Money Issue” — it will focus on providing the most important service to our readers that we possibly can: Running a profitable business. From marketing, to sales, to money management and building RMR, the July SD&I will be a business lifeline for the security dealer and integrator company owners and managers who read it. If you have ideas for articles that will help you run a more effective and profitable business, please shoot them my way via email or on Twitter, @SecurityDealer!
