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Dubai: When Fayssal Daoud shows you the home of the future, he starts
by showing you a small touch screen installed discreetly into a wall.
It’s
almost anti-climactic, but through this screen home owners can now
control almost any aspect of their house or apartment. By tapping a few
buttons on the screen, Daoud opens the living room curtains, turns on
the lights and starts some music. Have a romantic evening planned?
There’s a pre-programmed button for that. Tap the pad, and the lights
dim and softer music fills the room.
What if the music you
want isn’t there? No worries, you can just access it off of the
network’s storage system, where all your download movies are also
stored.
Speaking of worries, the
panel can also be used to access any of the home’s security cameras. In
this mini-apartment, there are four, and they can be viewed
simultaneously.
And did I mention the robotic arm in the bedroom with the TV mounted on the end?
Forget
any previous “homes of the future” you’ve seen. This isn’t a Disney-esq
attempt at predicting what life will be like in 20 years. Everything in
this home is available for installation — today.
Daoud is the
chief operating office of Eon, a retail store specialising in home
automation, also referred to as smart homes, e-homes, or connected real
estate, depending on who you speak to.
Eon is the brain child
of Leon Beuyukian, a founder and former CEO of CompuMe, a retailer of
home electronics and accessories. Beuyukian opened the first Eon store,
located in the Mall of the Emirates, in October of 2006. There are now
stores in Festival City, Abu Dhabi and, tentatively scheduled to opene
in August. a store in Dubai Mall.
But despite being open now
for almost 15 months, Beuyukian has only seen an estimated 430 requests
from walking customers looking for home automation. Of those, he
estimates that about 25 per cent have actually had anything installed.
The lack of customers isn’t from lack of interest or too much
competition, but from lack of knowledge about smart homes, he says.
“If we have more knowledgeable customers, our sales would shoot through the roof.”
The
time it will take to develop those customers is hard to determine.
Dubai is still in the early stages of smart home development says Yasir
Khokhar, who leads Microsoft’s digital city initiative in Dubai.
“We want to change that and make this a technology that is available to everyone,” he says.
There
are a number of reasons for the low rate of adoption. Older homes have
higher installation costs — Daoud says retro-fitting older homes can
add as much as 20 to 30 per cent of the cost — and property developers
haven’t fully embraced smart technology. Developers and technology
providers, Khokhar says, need to “give a little more trust to one
another”.
Having smart home technology installed isn’t cheap
either. Basic installation on systems that deliver audio and video
start at around Dh30,000-Dh40,000. The cost for a fully-equipped
two-bedroom smart home, such as the one Daoud showed this reporter, run
as high as Dh110,000-Dh140,000.
So for now, the biggest installer
of smart home technology is still property developers, who are offering
the technology as a way to differentiate their properties, Khokhar
says.
Amr Salem, the director of Connected Real Estate for
Cisco, a company that specialises in installing communications
infrastructure, says some developers consider smart home technology as
must.
“In all the upmarket, luxury developments, it’s de facto
to have a smart home infrastructure,” he says. “It will continue to
grow very strongly. Developers have realised that it’s not just about
the gadget at the end. It’s about the connectivity behind it.”
So
while Eon is still the only company offering smart home technology in
the retail market, the company is working with property developers.
Beuyukian
says Eon currently has bids out on construction projects worth Dh400
million and expects to convert at least Dh70 millions of those bid in
contracts, including some bids with DP World, by the end on the year.
Eon is already working on installing smart home technology in the Al
Habtoor Palm.
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