It’s the rare new home that comes without smart technology these days, but is it what buyers really want?
How smart is your home? If you own one of London’s swish new builds the answer is probably: very.
It is now de rigueur for a new property to come bristling with all the latest in domestic technology.
Rush hour traffic jams are full of smug homeowners putting the smart heating on from their smart phone, completing the sort of fossil fuel burning vortex President Trump could only dream of.
But as those in the business are frequently finding, buyers – particularly those of a certain age – aren’t that turned on by tech.
That’s not to say there aren’t any digital-savvy older people out there, but most folks with the assets to purchase property can probably remember a pre-internet age.
Unless you want to keep your five year old grandchild on speed dial in case you want to turn the TV on, you’d most likely be just as happy with an old fashioned flick-switch.
Even I, a digital native, would probably be little match for a smart home. Who can forget the data specialist who recently spent 11 hours live-tweeting his attempts to make a cup of tea using a WiFi enabled kettle?
Plus there’s the threat of a digital apocalypse to bear in mind. When the robots take over it will be terribly inconvenient if your toaster suddenly becomes hell bent on terminating you. It’s safer all round to stick to analog.
So if it’s not the technology that sells a home to a potential buyer, what is it?
According to industry insiders it comes down to space, and not the NASA kind.
Buyers from NW1 to N6, it turns out, are going wild for wardrobes.
We’re not talking a modest built-in here. These walk-ins rank somewhere between Carrie’s Sex and the City closet and a Kardashian style one-for-shoes-and-one-for-bags on the wardrobe scale.
One sales manager confided that it was the uber generous clothes cupboards that had buyers signing on the dotted line for luxury apartments up on Kidderpore Green.
Another architect joked that he was forever factoring in wardrobe space for bachelor clients, only to be called back in to re-think the room sizes once they married and merged shoe collections.
Square inches are always a property premium, but at this end of the market it’s what’s in the bedroom that counts.
Forget smart homes, it’s smart shoe storage that makes a sale a shoo-in.
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