Being me, one of the first things I wanted to do in my new home Smart home technology was created. That’s almost complete (I’m currently involved in a deadly battle with presence detectors) and I’ll have an update soon.
But there was also the matter of the smart home technology it was leaving behind, and that was less straightforward thanks to a surprising omission in the apple home ecosystem…
Smart homes receive mixed reviews from real estate agents. Some believe it adds value to a property and should therefore be included in the sale. Others say that fear of complexity can discourage some buyers and that they should sell the house without it.
I decided the smart thing to do was play it by ear: I would test potential buyers’ reaction when they saw the property by showing them several different elements.
As it turned out, my buyer was very interested in smart home technology and therefore we agreed that I would leave everything in place. That wasn’t much of a sacrifice from the perspective of my new home, as some of the technology had changed and I would have been tempted to upgrade in any case. For example, I used the new Hue Gradient Light Strips instead of the one-color-at-a-time versions I had at my old place, and now I want a smart lock that supports Apple Key.
Handing over my old smart home to its new owner was actually more problematic, because Apple doesn’t provide any mechanism to do so.
Until a year or two ago, this would have been a relatively esoteric problem. However, smart home technology is becoming more and more common and this problem will become more and more common. We had to use a workaround to provide a temporary solution that would allow my buyer to move into a functional smart home from day one and have a little time to plan their own acquisition of the entire kit.
That solution was to add it as an additional resident in the Apple Home app and agree with my broadband provider to drop service for a couple of weeks after I moved. That part went as planned and everything worked for him upon his arrival. But it was only a temporary solution.
In theory, we could have made it permanent. He could have used the same SSID and password for his new router, and we could have left me as the Apple Home owner and him as the resident. A Resident, unlike a Guest, can add and remove props, scenes, automations, and other users. However, there are still some things they can’t dolike adding HomePods, Apple TV or AirPlay devices.
More importantly, it would be a hassle for me to have an extra home on the app, and it would be an obvious overall security and privacy risk for previous homeowners to retain full access to all smart home technology, including locks.
Having so many Philips Hue products helped significantly. All the scenes and automations for these are actually stored on the bridge, and since I left it behind, it was easy to transfer them to the new home. But that doesn’t work with any device used as an Apple Home Hub, since the home settings are tied to the Apple account, not the hardware.
Solving this problem should be easy. All Apple needs to do is allow a third category of user that can be added to an Apple Home: Owner. Doing this should show a warning and passing it should demote the previous owner to Resident. This would mean that they would retain access during the transfer, and the new owner could delete them as soon as they wish.
As I said before, this is a problem that will become increasingly common as smart home technology continues to take off. It makes absolutely no sense for a key selling point of a home to stop working as soon as the new owner moves in, nor for you to have to painfully recreate the home’s setup from scratch, one device at a time.
Is this something you would like Apple to do? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
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