Home of the Future: The Smart Garage
Forget the dirty, oily garage of the past -- soon it will be one of the most technologically-connected rooms in your home.
While oil — and gas — prices have been steadily falling over the past months, there’s no doubt that today’s consumers are demanding high-efficiency vehicles, such as gas-electric mix, fuel cell or even pure electric. Some are even calling hybrid sales a recession-defying phenomena, though recent sales have started to fall flat.
Nevertheless, the home of the future will certainly feature changes in one room that barely anyone could have foreseen even a couple of years ago. Soon, garages will become “smart.”
According to Michael Brylawski, cofounder and leader of the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Mobility + Vehicle Efficiency (MOVE) Team, “”This is where your car, the house, and the electricity system meet.”
Not too soon in the future, your electric-hyrbid car will plug into power and data stations at home, near the office and even parking garages for recharging. While the initial push of energy will be from the grid to the car’s batteries, it is expected that those same batteries will serve another purpose — to store energy for the overall grid and serve as a way for power companies to smooth out the naturally fluctuating supply of energy.
In addition, that same connection could interface with computers that monitor the “health” of your car and its systems, serve as a way to monitor diagnostics and driving history and even be a way to sync inhome and onboard systems like media libraries (music and video), an integrated phone’s address book and downloads to GPS-driven services like restaurant guides.
Homebuyers With iPhones Rejoice: Trulia is THE App You Need
Savvy iPhone-equipped homebuyers have one more thing to covet -- Trulia announced this week that a new App for the iPhone is available (for free).
An article this week in Newsweek talks about consumer’s new fascination with self-directing their own new home search (the article starts off with a quaint recant of how the author — some decade or so ago — thought he was on the cutting edge, reviewing new listings his realtor faxed (!) over, then sat in the back of the realtor’s car as he was driven from home to home).
While many consumers still rely on the services of a realtor or broker, still more are doing the initial search themselves online, using popular listing sites like Craigslist, Trulia and Oodle, then gettign directions via Google Maps or MapQuest.
iPhone owners — ever the technosavvy and often envied — join their BlackBerry brethren this week with a new iPhone App from Trulia. According to reviews and information from the Newsweek article, homebuyers using the App can now:
- Search for homes by current location (we hope it uses the iPhone G3’s GPS abilities to determine what’s close).
- Ability to map your trip to a home from your current location (again, GPS is the key here).
- Ability to view current open houses.
- It’s easy to call or e-mail the listing agent.
Welcome to the eHomebuilding Marketing Blog
My name is Jim Tome and I am the author of this marketing-driven blog for smart builder and real estate advertising, marketing and public relations professionals. I have a long, storied background in innovative homebuilder-oriented marketing and web advertising in general and you can look to this blog to present some great insight into what builder marketing should be doing online as well as strategies and tactics to accomplish those goals.
