My Apartment Is Sold as “Home Automation”: What Does That Really Mean?

“I was told my apartment had home automation”

Who it’s for: Future buyers and owners of new homes.

It is a sentence we hear often, in one form or another, from people who have just bought a new home.

Centralised shutters. A video intercom. An alarm. Sometimes a smartphone app. The developer presents the whole package as a “smart residence”, and the new owner leaves feeling they have bought an intelligent home.

But one question deserves to be asked before any other: what can this home actually do on its own?

That question, more than the definition of the words “home automation”, is what we will focus on here.

“Home automation” can mean very different things

Two apartments can be sold with exactly the same sales pitch, “equipped with home automation”, while offering levels of operation that are very far apart.

This is not a matter of deception. It is a matter of vocabulary. In sales offers, the term “home automation” can cover very different levels of operation, from simply centralising a few devices to a largely automated and integrated installation. In between, there are several levels, and that is precisely what is at stake in the contract you sign, often without fully realising it.

A simple example: the shutters

Shutters are probably the most frequently cited item in a “home automation” offer, and also the easiest to break down.

Let us simply look at what can change behind the same sales expression: “automated shutters”.

• Individual control: I close my shutters one by one, with a switch.
• Centralisation: one button (or one tap in the app) closes all the shutters at once.
• Remote control: I do the same thing, but from my phone, from anywhere.
• Scene: the “Leaving” command closes the shutters and triggers other actions at the same time: turning off the lights, cutting certain sockets, arming the alarm.
• Automation: nobody presses anything. The system closes the shutters on its own, because it is 7 pm, or because the outdoor light has dropped, or because nobody is at home.

Five situations, one single device. And yet, in a sales brochure, they can all be summed up by the same phrase: “automated shutters”.

What about the video intercom, the alarm and the cameras?

This is probably where the most useful part of this article lies.

It would be tempting to say that a video intercom, an alarm or cameras are “not really” home automation. That would be inaccurate. These devices can perfectly well be part of a coherent home automation architecture. The real question is not whether they belong to it, but whether they work together.

Let us take a concrete case. An alarm detects an intrusion. What happens next?

• Do the lights switch on automatically, inside and outside?
• Do the shutters close, or on the contrary open to make an intervention easier?
• Does the owner receive a notification on their phone, wherever they are?
• Does this reaction depend on whether the home is in “away” mode?
• And if the Internet connection is down at the time of the intrusion, does the system still react?

If the answer to these questions is simply that the alarm triggers its own alert without interacting with the other systems, then it remains a connected device, installed alongside the others, without being truly integrated. It fulfils its security function, but it does not share information with the other systems in the home. It works next to the other devices rather than with them.

A truly automated system, by contrast, makes its devices talk to each other. The difference between the two situations does not show on a product sheet. It shows in how the home behaves at the moment something happens.

A mobile app is not enough to make a home smart

Another very common confusion: thinking that a smartphone app is proof of a “smart” home.

An app may simply replace several remote controls with a single screen. It is convenient, it is modern, but it is still only a form of remote control, not automation.

Real automation rests on a different principle, one that does not depend on the user being present: the system detects, interprets, acts and, where the architecture allows it, checks the result of the action. The app can stay closed on the phone for days; the home keeps reacting to its environment all the same.

This is a difference in nature, not in degree. An app can make a home easier to control. It does not automatically make it smarter.

How do you know what you are being sold?

This table can serve as a reading grid, to compare a sales brochure or a residence's technical sheet with what it actually describes:

This table is not there to judge an offer. It is there to question it.

The real issue is not “is it home automation?”

At this stage, one thing becomes clear: the question “does my apartment have home automation?” is not the right question. In sales offers, very different installations can all be presented as “home automation”.

The real question is a different one:

What level of automation and integration is actually planned for my home? And will the installed architecture allow me to make it evolve tomorrow?

These two points, integration between systems and the ability to evolve, are what separate a well-designed installation from a simple accumulation of connected devices. This is also why a system that is well designed today will be able to take on, in a few years, controlled air conditioning, finer lighting control or energy management, without starting again from scratch. A poorly designed system, even one with many functions at the start, can on the contrary become a bottleneck as soon as you want to add anything.

Questions to ask before you buy

In practice, here are the questions a future buyer can ask the developer or the installer, without needing to be a technician:

• Which devices are actually included in the home?
• Are they integrated with each other, or does each one work on its own?
• Which scenes are actually available from handover?
• What happens if the Internet connection goes down?
• Which technology or protocol is used?
• Can the system evolve, or is it fixed once installed?
• Will it be possible to add air conditioning, lighting or energy management later?
• Who will be able to work on this system in five or ten years?
• Will documentation of the installation be handed over to the buyer?

These nine questions require no technical skills to ask. They simply require knowing that they need to be asked.

How we approach this kind of project

So the first question is not “which brand will you install?”, but “what do you expect from the home today, and in five years?”

At ExaBuilding, when we are asked to assess an existing installation, or to support a project under way, that is where we start: the occupants' real uses, how the devices communicate with each other, the overall architecture of the system, and how the home can evolve over time.

It is this reading, more than the list of devices, that tells you what a home can really do, and what it will be able to do tomorrow.

Conclusion

A smart home is not defined by the number of devices you can control from a switch or a smartphone. It is defined by what those devices can do together, by what the system can automate without human intervention, and by its ability to evolve with the building.

So before asking whether an apartment has “home automation”, it is better to ask what it can actually do.