Young & Old Alike Ripe for the Residential RMR Picking

Security dealers need to understand their residential customer’s needs and which vendors can help them reach your goals based on the smart home market conditions.

By offering so many different smart devices across so many applications, the customer can build systems, and dealers can build revenues accordingly. And unlike the early days of smart-home deployments, these benefits and add-ons are no longer exotic and difficult to sell. In fact, millennials don’t want to live in the same kind of home their parents lived in. They think of structured wiring or smart-home features as adding tremendous value when buying a home.

Target Lifestyles With New Technology

Consider these numbers: There are some 76 million baby boomers in the U.S. and 10,000 of them become seniors every day. Moreover, some 43 million of these boomers act as caregivers to elderly family members and loved ones who choose to stay in their homes, something the health-care industry calls “aging in place.” This is an overwhelmingly popular option for families, not only for the sake of familiarity and comfort, but also cost.

Assisted and independent living centers are extremely expensive, and financing these options (if, in fact, it is an option) typically creates a significant financial burden on all parties involved. Compared to these facilities, a smart-tech, connected aging home environment is not only a more appealing option, it’s a financial bargain.

Consider how simple it is to extend a security system into functioning as a senior monitoring system. The logic stays consistent with traditional security offerings: sensors record activity, locks are remotely operable, interior and ambient lighting can be scheduled, and so on. The devices largely remain the same, but what’s changed is the perspective toward activity and the desired parameters for notifications and response. A senior monitoring deployment is simply a security deployment with specialized rules and actions.

An integrator’s showroom is one of the greatest assets he/she has in selling the benefits of the smart home.

For example, from the standpoint of a conventional home security system, the best activity is no activity. During daytime hours, an untriggered motion sensor means there’s been no unexpected or unwanted human activity. However, what if activity was, in fact, not only desirable, but something of keen interest from a monitoring perspective? Caregivers want to know about the daily activity of their aging parents or, more importantly, the lack of it. Are there excessive trips to the bathroom? Is sleep interrupted nightly? Are there enough trips to the kitchen for proper diet? All of these are critical questions can easily be addressed through simple monitoring, using many of the same components as a traditional security system, and with a smart-home system, now they can all be reported and controlled through the interoperable home control system. Together they paint a picture of wellness that allows all parties to be safer – not only reactively, but proactively.

Of course, today’s active seniors are just one segment of the population who stand to benefit from the strategic implementation of sens
ors and home control hardware. What if customers are located in an area that has a relatively high population of hunters? Gun owners can be marketed to using systems that will alert them anytime a gun cabinet or firearm storage room has been accessed as an added level of safety for any traditional lock systems they may already have in place.

RELATED: Report: Security Dealers Losing Grip on Home Automation Market

Many parents of young children spend hundreds of dollars on video monitors and other technology used to keep a watch over their children. The drawback is that this gear has no real security features and offers only limited range. You could easily create a “Smart Home Family Starter Kit” that includes a control panel, a few cameras for the nursery and play room, and connected smoke and CO detectors for added safety. Since most parents of young children think more about safety with-in the house as opposed to break-ins, it’s a slightly different hook to sell the same solution. And let’s not forget about parents of teens: certainly many clients would understand the value of putting a contact sensor on the liquor cabinet.

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