Does smart home tech add to the resale value of a property? Maybe …

A new residential property survey is suggesting that smart home tech can add to the resale value, though there are some big caveats. The headline news is that more than a quarter of American homebuyers are now willing to pay a premium for smart homes, and that the average perceived value-add is $18k … There are two elements to Vivint’s survey: an analysis of 35,000 home listings across the country, looking for price differences between those which do and don’t highlight smart home features, and a survey of 1,000 US buyers, asking how much they valued these when buying their new home. The first part of that very clearly doesn’t mean anything. It showed that the average price of a smart home was almost double that of a non-smart home. The exact difference varied between cities, ranging from a 175% premium in Chicago to a negative premium in Texas locations like Arlington and Plano. (I’m saying nothing about Texans …) In almost all cases, the differences are way too big to be related ... Read full article.