The future has arrived and it’s time to take your hands off the wheel. Yes, there is the opportunity to do that with a new self-driving car, but now you can offer your home buyers the chance to do that with their homes. With new smart home innovations, homeowners can take a back seat on watching, monitoring, and maintaining their home.
In the reNEWable Living Home, the BUILDER concept project for 2018, Meritage Homes explores how to take a home into the technologies of the future, much like the auto industry has done with the autonomous vehicles.
Here, Brian Kittle, Orlando division president for Meritage Homes, talks about some of the next-generation concepts that come to life in the reNEWable Living Home.
Kittle offers that Meritage Homes is building the most energy-efficient homes in the market by challenging status quo every single day.
“We never knew we wanted smartphones or autonomous cars, but they are here and we couldn’t imagine life without them,” says Kittle. “This home is the next step in introducing consumers to a new place to live. It’s the smart car of the housing industry.”
The Meritage Homes team selected several products that not only can be controlled by an app and improve the performance and functionality of the home, but also are intuitive and can learn from buyer preferences.
In a January 2017 report, McKinsey Research says that we are experiencing the tipping point for smart home technologies to start anticipating our needs by using advanced data analytics and increased computing power and by incorporating artificial intelligence (AI). In the same article, McKinsey predicts that within the next 10 years, we will be living in homes that have technology that can manage and perform household tasks. The research firm believes homes will have a new capacity to create emotional connections with their inhabitants.
Meritage Homes started to enter that era by identifying and selecting some new products for the reNEWable Living Home that can work for the homeowner. For starters, the Whirlpool Scan to Cook appliances not only can scan the UPC code on a box to know exactly how to cook it, removing the user from the process, but it also can learn and adapt to preferences, such as how crispy someone likes their pizza.
The irrigation system is something that needs to be monitored on a regular basis in order to maximize efficiency. However, with smart home technologies, that’s changing. Here, the Toro irrigation system checks the weather and can adjust according to anticipated rainfall.
The technology extends to areas of wellness, too. An app by Aprilaire allows home owners to control indoor air comfort by monitoring and proactively responding to changes in temperature and humidity to keep the house clean, dry, and comfortable, regardless of whether its 90 degrees with 90% humidity outside or 30 degrees with 30% humidity.
These smart home innovations will be on display in Orlando in January. Register now to visit the home and see the systems perform.
