Smart home services are expanding into entire apartment complexes

Report after report says that people, especially millennials, are hankering for smart homes, an industry that’s estimated to soar to $53 billion by 2022. So it’s no surprise that companies are now exploring bringing smart home systems into entire apartment complexes rather than just single-family houses. While turning a rental into a smart home is certainly doable for resourceful and tech-savvy tenants, these new services will allow property managers themselves to control hundreds of smart devices in a complex at once.

Vivint, a smart home provider that also makes its own devices like smart locks and security cameras, is expanding its reach into single- and multi-family rentals. Its new service, Smart Properties, lets property managers design their own smart home system, which the company will then install on site. Using an interactive central dashboard, property managers can take care of tenant service requests, provide keyless entry for staff contractors for unoccupied units, monitor smart thermostats for efficient energy use, and more.

An upcoming service from property management software provider Entrata will essentially offer all the same functionalities (and it’s called, surprise, SmartProperty) but with the benefit of already having some 3.5 million apartment units in over 20,000 complexes on board. This means that property managers who already use Entrata’s software for managing payments, leases, accounting, etc. can just elect to enroll in the new smart home offering and Entrata will come and install a central hub that enables its software to talk to the breadth of smart devices available on the market.

Both announced at last week’s National Apartment Association Education Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, these new products are boosting the signal of a service already offered by recent startups like Stratis and Dwelo. Ready or not, smart apartment complexes are bubbling up and your next rental may be more automated than you ever though possible. Stay tuned.