Smart-home products are considered a luxury for apartment residents today, but they’ll soon become expected. In three to five years, “learning thermostats,” which automatically program themselves to a resident’s habits; digitally managed door locks; and other home-automation technology will be must-haves for renters, regardless of location or asset type.
As home automation takes hold in multifamily, the benefits are numerous, but so are the hidden challenges. The case can be made that a centralized platform can alleviate some of these complications.
The Benefits
The primary goal with smart-home technology is to empower residents to use it to its full potential to create the most convenient, seamless living experience. At Mill Creek, we’ve found that our residents crave the convenience and utility savings that Nest thermostats offer, adore the ever-increasing Bluetooth options coming on the market, and appreciate the multifaceted benefits of smart-key access. In addition to easy entry and no-hassle key replacement, the latter product enables communities to better monitor and manage vendor and visitor access to a community’s units and amenity spaces.
Smart-home tech also delivers a “wow” factor that creates an eye-opening leasing tour experience that can differentiate your community from its competitors. A tech-savvy approach can certainly serve as a tiebreaker in the minds of prospective residents.
Apartment operators today also view advanced technology as a potential source of ancillary income, a means of better community management, and an important conduit for data collection.
Common Challenges
While many benefits accompany smart-home technology, significant challenges exist that have held apartment operators back. Among the glaring obstacles are a lack of centralized control systems, seemingly endless brands and technologies to choose from, and steep learning curves for on-site associates.
While each home-automation product has its own niche, one of the most important decisions for an apartment operator to make is deciding which products to adopt. You have to discern what brands work well and integrate together, or choose a package designed specifically for multifamily communities.
Equally important are centralized controls, which provide the ability to incorporate the technology into your current property management software so that you’re able to easily manage all of the smart-home elements.
One of the biggest pain points early in the process is that each piece of technology comes with a different website or software program. On-site team members have to log in to multiple different systems and keep pace with numerous changes and upgrades to various software platforms.
Any system using the latest technology has a learning curve for associates and residents alike. Many Mill Creek communities have a wall-mounted Bluetooth speaker to which residents can connect their phones. The challenge, however, is that each apartment home has its own special code to connect. Residents, naturally, will contact the office to request the code, increasing phone traffic at the community and taking up more time among already-busy leasing teams.
Hidden Challenges
Beyond the common challenges of smart-home technology are other, unanticipated obstacles apartment operators may not realize exist until they start testing and implementing the products in their communities.
Many smart thermostats, for example, require training to use correctly. Without proper setup and usage, residents might experience higher initial utility bills, causing frustration for tenants. The devices also require maintenance staff to take extra time in each apartment to change the settings at move-out.
Future-proofing can serve as an additional challenge. Developers have to forecast which technologies are going to stay around and which might be a flash in the pan. It’s pretty safe to say that digitally managed door locks are a long-term play. But the staying power of devices like the Amazon Echo or the Apple HomePod might be less of a certainty.
In addition to concerns about some products’ long-term market presence, many residents might have a brand preference, so it might be better to allow them to choose the ones they want rather than provide them with a certain brand across the board.
From a technical standpoint, too, there are a handful of hurdles surrounding the architecture of how smart-home technology is configured. Take “air-gapping,” for instance, in which an exclusive, secure network is created. In such a setup, does each unit have a gateway? Or does one gateway service multiple apartments? How does the gateway connect to the Internet? Do you provide access to the Internet, or is the resident responsible for establishing it? If your company provides the Internet access, are there certain liabilities to consider?
Another potential hazard to consider is degradation of a community’s Wi-Fi. When installing the many smart-home items in a consolidated, dense environment like an apartment community, you have a lot of convergent signals going back and forth. That forces you to decide whether to change frequencies on devices or perhaps include Internet service in the rent. But then you’re responsible for the speeds and bandwidth.
Centralization Can Help
Centralization is a potential game changer in smart-home technology. The ability to monitor the lights, thermostats, and doors of vacant units from a centralized system could save utility expenses and maintenance time. It could also provide additional customer service capabilities. If a resident is out of town and forgets to adjust her settings, for example, on-site teams could easily make adjustments for her.
An integrated platform could also help apartment operators connect the three common community entryways—into the building, into common areas, and into an apartment home—and enable the resident to operate them seamlessly. Having those entryways on one governing access point would eliminate the need to use multiple phones or fobs.
Many apartment operators who develop in rapid fashion could greatly benefit from centralization because they’re always in lease-up mode. To keep up with the breakneck pace, having a centralized system would help developers future-proof and eliminate many headaches along the way.
Consolidating everything into one application seems like a simple enough concept, but it’s difficult when different devices tie to different pieces of the pie, and you have multiple apps to control them all. Centralization can provide the benefit of a customized app that can integrate with another app.
Having one app, too, is particularly beneficial to the resident, who doesn’t have to open multiple apps just to get through the property.
The multifamily industry isn’t quite synonymous with home automation yet. But with the potential capabilities of centralization, smart-home technology will transform amenity packages from “nice to have” to “must have.”
