Smart Home Features Are Becoming the Standard

More homebuyers are expecting pre-installed smart products in new homes, and builders and manufacturers are moving to meet the demand, according to Curbed.

Thomas James recently joined the recently launched Brilliant Builders program, a group of roughly two dozen large developers and homebuilders across the country installing smart home control systems from the San Mateo, California-based startup.

At a time when voice-control systems such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Home may dominate smart home discourse, the Brilliant control panel, a sort of universal remote for smart home devices that’s about as large as a typical light switch and can work with most existing products and networks, seeks to upend the market by arriving, pre-installed, with new homes. Diehl sees the controller as a perfect way to communicate a home’s high-tech features to potential buyers.

“With Ring and Nest, you need to download an app to see how something works, and if we wired a home with, say, Apple HomeKit, buyers would be stuck with Apple products,” he says. “With Brilliant, it’s a conversation starter because there’s a screen there. You can touch something and just understand the home is smart.”

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