Photo: Lennar
Consumers get the smart home experience at Amazon open houses
Amazon.com has teamed up with homebuilder Lennar to open model smart homes across the country that are driven by its Alexa technology.
The e-tail giant has opened Amazon Experience Centers in Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington DC, with plans to open others soon.
People visiting the Alexa-enabled model homes can use the technology to control the lights, television, thermostat, window shades and more. It also demonstrates the ease with which customers can order products and services using technology available from Amazon, such as its Dash Button.
“We wanted customers to experience a real home environment that showcases the convenience of the Alexa smart home experience, great entertainment available with Prime, and Home Services,” said Nish Lathia, general manager, Amazon Services, in a statement. “We are excited to extend our relationship with Lennar with the launch of Amazon Experience Centers. As one of the nation’s largest homebuilders, Lennar offers the potential to enable this experience within easy driving distance of millions of customers.”
Lennar had previously worked with Apple and its Siri tech in building smart homes, but switched to Amazon because of its “white-glove installation services,” according to Bloomberg. The home builder includes a visit from Amazon experts who set up devices to work with two Echo speakers that come with each house.
“Amazon’s ability to bring a home to life with Alexa smart home experiences, entertainment and services — coupled with their obsession with customer experience — is a natural extension of our everything’s included approach to homebuilding,” said David Kaiserman, president of Lennar Ventures. “We picked Amazon because of our shared commitment to customers, their Amazon experts across the country, and their ability to connect customers with thousands of service providers through Amazon Home Services.”
Discussion Questions
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: How do you see the Amazon/Lennar collaboration affecting the retail market for smart home devices in the U.S.? Does Lennar’s selection of Amazon Home Services suggest that Amazon may be able to compete with Best Buy and others when it comes to service?
Poll
BrainTrust
Mohamed Amer, PhD
Independent Board Member, Investor and Startup Advisor
Chris Buecker
Founder & Chairman, International TCG Retail Summit
The best way to understand the smart home experience is to be in an actual house. The Amazon/Lennar collaboration allows consumers to do just that. It’s good for Amazon and for Lennar. Lennar gets the benefit of showing potential home buyers that it understands the latest technologies. Amazon can demonstrate its leadership in smart home devices.
The collaboration of Amazon and Lennar is an excellent way of taking today’s technology one step further. Having a new home fitted for all the services Alexa can provide will be very appealing to many purchasing new homes and gives both companies a competitive edge. However, with technology changing rapidly what we see today as the benefit of Alexa will most likely be a thing of the past in a few years and how that might affect the internal home design could potentially be a problem.
Apple, Best Buy, and other players will continue to develop their products. Builders started wiring homes in the ’90s for the internet with jacks on the walls, then came Wi-Fi and we no longer use the wall connections, so it will be interesting to see what the technology of the future will need for smart devices. But for now, this is a great concept and brilliant opportunity for Amazon and Lennar.
Not long ago, the new homebuilding creativity was limited to design centers partnering with furniture and appliance vendors to shape the look and feel of the new living space. Today, technology is not only augmenting but even defining the new physical spaces that define our identities and lifestyles.
Welcome to the future, today. The market for smart homes and connected lifestyles will be so large and diverse that Amazon, Best Buy, and many more will find fertile grounds for growth. Retailing is becoming as much about the products and experiences as it is about new class of services that enrich our lives. The future retail assortment will become a much broader concept and be far more demanding on merchants and marketers.
This move clearly exposes more of the potential and practicality of the smart home and the devices that can be controlled and the controller. With this arrangement more people will be able to se touch feel and understand this technology and thereby, open up this new market.
As to the Best Buy question, Amazon could sell Alexa to run devices sold in Best Buy….
This is definitely a winning idea. Every time someone visits a model home they can experience the Amazon smart home vision fully implemented to showcase every feature. I only hope Amazon is smart enough to record people experiencing their smart homes — think of the marketing potential of those videos! If you have ever stayed in Alexa-equipped hotel rooms you likely have had a similar experience with how much the convenience of Alexa simplifies managing all the tech in your room.
“Try before you buy” is, pardon the pun, a tried and true approach (see all the demo tasting stations at Costco), and this example of the practice will prove to be a winner for both Amazon and Lennar, I am sure.
This is a brilliant idea. I think a lot of smart home capabilities get viewed as “meh, is it really worth all that trouble?” but once you really experience it, a lot of those benefits become much more readily apparent. You kind of have to experience it to really appreciate it.
And, when it comes down to it, for smart homes to become mainstream, it’s not the homeowner who is really going to want to be the one to install it. But if the home comes already equipped with smart outlets and wifi connected devices that are already set up and presented to you on a tablet, how can you resist?
Home improvement retailers (and electronics retailers and even some general merchandise retailers) have been trying to get it together to figure out how to sell smart home technology to consumers. While there will still be an enormous market for retrofit, Amazon has gotten in front of the game by targeting new homes — with an experience that might easily be taken to retrofits too.
This is a great move for both Amazon and Lennar. The biggest barrier to home automation is comfort levels with the technology. This partnership does two things: demonstrate the technology in a very approachable way and show home buyers that it is not just for “high-end homes.” Seamlessly integrating smart home devices into the home buying/building experience will accelerate adoption of the technology in much the same way other innovations took hold. Think prewired telephone jacks, then air conditioning, cable connections, Wi-Fi hotspots, etc. We are going to see a dramatic acceleration of smart home technology over the next five years, and it will become a “standard feature” of new home construction in ten years.
Wow. This is a smart move of Amazon. The issue with smart home devices has always been how to deliver the CX to the end consumers. Smart home corners or shop in shop solutions here in Europe have failed so far to really excite the customer. These areas were often abandoned when I visited them and did not work. Either at John Lewis, Dixons Carphone in UK or Mediamarkt across Europe. If Amazon and Lennar can really create a strong CX, then it would be a strong consumer-oriented proposition. But they have to get it right.
Neither Amazon nor Lennar should overlook the importance of home security, climate control, connectivity or entertainment installation companies. It is these integrators and audio-visual who are already entering millions of homes weekly and are trusted to provide products and services that enhance the home environment. Honeywell, Phillips, Johnson Controls, ADI Global and others have known the value that consumers place on such services, even as home improvement retailers can sell equipment. Alexa marketing has to take its game to a new level.
The single most critical thing to smart home and IoT adoption is customer experience using the product. The Amazon/Lennar collaboration is exactly what is needed — hands on experience in real homes. This announcement should strike fear in the rest of smart home manufacturers and raises the stakes considerably for Google Home.
One clear retail winner in all of this might be Best Buy, or small electrical shops specializing in installation. Scaling to the masses requires retrofitting to existing homes. Self install has not proven easy for home consumers. The Amazon/Lennar partnership signals that the age of the digital plumber has clearly arrived.
This is no different than an appliance company putting their merchandise into display and spec homes. If you want to get the consumer excited about a product, let them see it, feel it, touch it and experience it. And, who better than to install and service the technology than Amazon and/or its affiliates like Lennar?
Smart Homes are still in the great minority, but as time goes on, more homeowners will start taking advantage of what a Smart Home has to offer. And, the only way to make this happen is to showcase the advantages to the homeowner what is possible. Make them want it. Amazon has to be in multiple channels if it wants to be a leader in this technology. I anticipate Amazon will find other ways to get in front of the consumer, beyond showcasing in display homes.
Brilliant move — don’t use words to describe the potential, let them experience it for themselves!
Sidebar observation, but I hope that we as a culture weigh the pros and cons carefully when entering into this kind of evolved home lifestyle. Ease and convenience is the drug — but it comes with a potential price, some of which is yet to be seen. I’m not an alarmist, but working within the privacy concerns being discussed within the digital out-of-home sector, I just think that getting ahead of privacy and security issues is important. And overlooked. At least until something happens.
Customers are still getting used to smart home devices. Amazon has made the biggest impact with its Echo/Alexa offering, but we’re not yet at the point where this tech is commonplace. Even new homes aren’t being built “smart” as standard. There’s a real need for customers to see this tech in situ so they can see what it can do for their own homes and lives. With that in mind this collaboration makes a lot of sense — both Amazon and Lennar are going to benefit from it, and customers are going to be able to interact with the tech and imagine it in their own homes. That might drive up sales of such devices — and of course Amazon will benefit from that.
Experience is a great teacher, so finding a way for consumers to experience what Echo can do is great for Amazon. Lennar has been promoting its one price includes everything approach to building a house so this is another benefit for them to showcase. Not everyone is building a new house or starting from scratch. As more consumers purchase Echo, or similar devices from other companies, and hook up their homes, there will be opportunities for consumers to see the devices in use — both the good and the bad. Other companies will develop devices and other retailers will find ways to demonstrate the devices. The next question is how many consumers will see it as a convenience or will find setting up or using the device to be too inconvenient.
This new approach with Lennar does not really demonstrate Amazon as a service provider unless Amazon is ready to have people come to an individual’s home to set up Echo.
Smart home experience is trending at a good time. The people interested will be the younger generation who grew up using and understanding technology.
Max said the best way to understand it is to actually experience it in a house. I agree; especially for those of us who did not grow up with a firm understanding of how technology can work. Lennar and Amazon are now a step ahead of the field.