Partnering with Homebase to offer Multi-Family “Smart Home” Technology

By Neal Bellamy, IT Director at Kenton Brothers

Smart home technology has been around for a few years. It’s the ability to control lights, thermostats, locks and more in your home using an app or a remote control. It’s building automation for your home. If you own a condo or an apartment complex, how can you offer the smart home experience to your tenants? Can you use the same products as a single-family home or a commercial building?

Let me show you how partnering with the right people can make smart home tech another bonus for your complex.

First of all, the typical smart home and commercial products aren’t a great fit for multi-family buildings. Most of the building is made up of individual “homes” with each home needing to have their own control over locks, lights, etc. However, there are also common areas in a commercial building including a gym, pool or front entrance that every tenant will need access to.

You may need an intercom system to call a tenant if they have a visitor. To accomplish the task, you need two experts. One in Smart Home and the other in commercial security systems. Partnering with Homebase, Kenton Brothers has helped several multi-family facilities offer smart home tech to their clientele.

Homebase offers a tenant all of the smart home features like automatic locks, lights and thermostats. However, they also solve the problems associated with an apartment or condo like move in/move out, demo unit access, dog walker or cleaning service access through the front and tenant doors. They also offer a maintenance ticketing system and shared space access for all tenants.

Kenton Brothers makes sure that the right locking hardware and other security systems are in place and integrated.

Not every “smart” lock is ready for this application. Different doors will have different needs for intercom, access control, and/or smart home. An electrified lock on the front door of the complex will be very different than the door to a unit, but both need to be compatible with the building automation, or smart home system. The intercom system needs to call tenants wherever they are because many people no longer have land lines.

For more information, click here to download our guide for “Top 11 Solutions for Multi-Family Properties”

If you want to offer smart home functionality for your tenants, give us a call. We’ll partner with you and Homebase to integrate the different systems and features to create the right environment for you and your tenants.