Thursday, March 29, 2012

Smart homes are gathering pace

Bangalore has seen “smart home” project launches by Sobha Developers and Mantri Developers in the past two weeks. “Smart homes integrate technology inside the house and the community with a security and comfort point of view,” Mr J.C. Sharma, Managing Director, Sobha Developers,

On Tuesday, Mantri Developers tied up with networking giant Cisco for tech solutions for all its future projects. As part of this initiative, Cisco will plan the developer's 12 residential projects – 28 million sq. ft. of super built-up area – over the next five years.

“Smart homes are the way of the future and residents will have access to wireless door locks, customized settings for lights, blinds, air-conditioning and touch-screen panels that can be controlled through Internet Protocol (IP),” said Mr Anil Menon, President, Globalization and Smart+Connected Communities, Cisco.

According to Ms Snehal Mantri, Director, Mantri Developers, customers can choose from three packages — silver, gold and platinum. These solutions would be available at Rs 300-350 per sq. ft.

For instance, a customer booking a 2,000-sq-ft home would spend anywhere between Rs 6 lakh and Rs 7 lakh for these smart home solutions.

Sobha Developers recently launched its Sobha Habitech project in Whitefield, one of Bangalore's IT hubs. In its second week of launch, Mr Sharma said the project has received “good response.”

The project offers customers smart-home features such as console-controlled switches, video-door phone, mood setting features, video surveillance and gas leak sensors. Though Sobha Developers refused to divulge its technology partner for this project, company officials said the tie-up would be extended to future projects too.

Home-grown companies such as Silvan Innovation Labs too are seeing increasing demand for smart-home solutions. Dr Giri Krishna, CEO, Silvan Innovation Labs, said customers who have bought houses upwards of Rs 80 lakh are willing to invest in technologies such as surveillance, home safety and device management solutions such as controlling centralised HVAC system or split ACs.

In other cases, residents are willing to fork out Rs 400-1,000 a month on surveillance-related technologies.

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