Benefits of Making Your Investment Property a Smart Home

amenities build-to-rent market research value add Sep 29, 2021
 

The perks of upgrading your rental unit to include smart home capabilities. What are the pros and cons? Can you charge more in rent?

Watch the full episode, here: https://youtu.be/H0g2Lf81gG8


Let's talk about smart homes. This is a trend in rental investments and even single-family that seems to be pretty standard across the board in new communities, at least.

Chase Leavitt

We're starting to see that more and more. A smart home, what's gonna be included in that?

You could have a keyless entry, a camera on the doorbell where tenants can see who's at their front door from their phone. And then most likely some sort of a smart home panel within that unit. Just like an alarm panel. The alarm can be set up or not, but some sort of a smart home panel. And a smart thermostat.

Sherida Zenger

The other thing that's big right now, too, is the garage door openers that have that MyQ technology. And I'm like so if you have you know, garage door opener that has that it's kind of nice, you can do it from your phone as well.

Steve Olson

And that's not as hard to set up as you would think. We have a specific company that a couple of the people that we do this with developed from the ground up.

However, there's a lot of companies that can easily go install this smart home package a couple of thousand bucks on the front end. And whether you're building like a little duplex in your neighborhood or a giant project, you could have them come in and wire that and put that in and you can usually monetize it.

You can charge a little bit extra rent, say this is a technology fee. It's $50 a month. And usually from that panel, they can upgrade their Comcast cable package, they can subscribe to a security system because you're already hardwired for it.

Sherida Zenger

Yeah, that makes it nice people.

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