IoT in real estate has been restricted to high-end projects with basic switching systems.

From speaking to people in the industry, the low penetration into the sector seems to be due to the lack of knowledge and the high cost.

Many real estate companies use home automation as a selling point (“Smart House”) and don’t offer the advantages of the real benefits of IoT.

IoT does not cost as much as people think. A typical system for standard real estate application should cost less than 30-40% above the traditional wiring costs with an energy-saving benefit which would give the customer an ROI of about 24 months. If the real estate companies plan the implementation and customise a system to their needs, the cost could be further reduced.

I used it as an intelligent power ecosystem within a house, office or industry instead of just a switching system that can be very beneficial to the users of the ease of use and energy efficiency (hence cutting costs). Using automated data analysis, the ecosystem can be optimised to reduce the overall consumption in places where energy is wasted. Maintenance costs can be drastically reduced through continuous monitoring and preventive maintenance alerts.

A few projects we have studied where simple IoT was implemented correctly have shown savings on energy consumption of up to 24% with essential energy management. This can be increased and improved on with an intelligent energy management system that should reach even 40%. Now, this would be a “Real Smart House”.

We are at a time where governments are promoting the intelligent country, smart cities, innovative municipalities etc., but none of this is possible without real intelligent homes.