It was one of the first things I wanted to be my new home smart home technology was built. It’s almost done (I’m currently engaged in a battle to the death with presence detectors) and I’ll have an update soon.
But there was also the matter of smart home technology, which I left behind – and it was less straightforward thanks to a surprising bug. Apple House ecosystem…
Smart homes get mixed reviews from real estate agents. Some believe it adds value to the property and should therefore be included in the sale. Others say the fear of complications may put off some buyers and you should sell the home without it.
I decided that the smartest thing to do was to play it by ear: I would test the reaction of potential buyers by showing them several different elements of the property when they viewed it.
It turned out that my buyer was extremely passionate about smart home technology, so we agreed that I would put everything in place. It wasn’t much of a sacrifice from the point of view of my new home, as some of the technology had moved on and I was motivated to upgrade anyway. For example, I used the new Hue Gradient Light Strips instead of the single-color versions in my old place, and now I want a smart lock with Apple Key support.
In fact, handing over my old smart home to a new owner was 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 issue will become more and more common. We had to use a workaround to provide a workaround that would allow my buyer to move into a working smart home on day one and take some time to plan their takeover of the whole kit.
The solution was to add it as an additional Resident in the Apple Home app and agree with my broadband provider to keep the service in place for a few weeks after the move. This part went according to plan and everything worked for him when it arrived. But this was only a temporary solution.
In theory, we could make it permanent. He could use the same SSID and password for his new router and we could leave me as the owner of the Apple Home and him as the Resident. A Resident, unlike a Guest, can add and remove accessories, scenes, automations, and other users. However, there are still some things they can’tfor example, add HomePods, Apple TV or AirPlay devices.
More importantly, having an extra home in the app would be a concern for me, and retaining full access to all smart home technology, including locks, for previous homeowners would be more of an obvious security and privacy risk.
Having a lot of Philips Hue products helped significantly. All the scenes and automations for these are actually stored in the bridge, and since I left that behind, it was easy to move them to the new home. But it doesn’t work with any device used as an Apple Home hub, because home settings are tied to an Apple account, not the hardware.
The solution to this problem should be simple. All Apple needs to do is allow a third category of user that can be added to Apple Home: Owner. Doing so should display a warning and confirming it should downgrade the previous owner to Resident. This would mean they would retain access upon handover and the new owner could delete them as they wished.
As I said before, this is a problem that will become more and more common as smart home technology continues to evolve. It makes no sense for a home’s main selling point to stop working as soon as a new owner moves in, or to have to painfully recreate the home setup from scratch one appliance at a time.
Is this what you wish Apple would do? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
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