By Living Room Realty, January 14, 2021
“Alexa! Play that funky music”
The early 2000’s will be the effective birth of all things “Smart-home” and many of these devices have shown us the possibility of compounding the 5 minutes of time searching through mountainous music collections back, while others have restored that 20 second trip from bed to light-switch, and back to bed again.
As real estate agents we often find ourselves learning quickly what smart-home features are taking the market by storm, and in this we have found some feelings of appreciation, and some of concern. The smart home features that we love include:
Smart Music Players
We now walk into many rooms, and ask for music on demand, almost like having every musician you’ve ever heard follow you around the house tirelessly waiting for your requests. Surely the days of looking for the right CD folder or hoping that the cassette tape is intact or brushing the grooves of your record have all but passed (there is something quite wonderfully nostalgic about maintaining these collections). Thanks to technology we often can walk into a room, ask for the music and enjoy… calling out for just the right mood-music makes open-house experiences fun.
Smart Lights
Wirelessly controlled or scheduled outlets, lightbulbs, fixtures, and Christmas lights can make entering and leaving a smart home feel like a breeze. Smart Lights can be a bit of a financial commitment, try smart plugs as a starting point for hard to reach lamps before diving into replacing every specialized bulb. If you get the fixtures upgraded, then movie nights get so much more fun when you get all snuggled up and dim the overheads from your phone.
Smart Doors
Deadbolts, Doorknobs, and Garage Doors on wireless remote are now able to be operated from the internet. Need to go out of town but your cousin is finally able to return the power-sprayer he borrowed two weeks ago? “Leave it in the garage Cousin Larry.” The best part is feeling lighter in the pockets from needing to carry fewer keys. Keep the batteries charged, and you can check that the door is locked from the comfort of your toasty bed.
Smart Home concerns we’ve encountered mostly come from needing to have confidential conversations in homes where audio/video recording is present, or the times when early iterations weren’t as user friendly (doors being difficult to open because of access codes being wrong or needing the enter key pressed before and after the code).
Overall, we’re enjoying the new possibilities of time saved, security provided, and mood selected.
-Nicholas Nascimento
