Why smart home firms need a smarter pivot

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₹20 lakh. The curtains go down at 5pm everyday on their own and the lights turn on. The home theatre has a preset ‘movie mode’.

Press that button and the projector switches on, the speakers turn on, the lights dim. The ‘theatre watching experience’ is thereby linked to that single button. All the gadgets in the house are controlled through a mobile app and voice assistants like Alexa.

“Vartika has programmed everything in the house. The automation system and cabling is so versatile that five years down the line, if we get an even more advanced system, it can be done easily," said Arora. Since home automation solutions have largely been perceived to be luxury, its adoption has been rather patchy in India.

Bonito Designs, an interior design company, says that only 15% of its customers ask for automation. Arora’s home is at the higher end of the spending spectrum. Estimates from Smarttron Automations, a company into residential automation, suggest that wireless automation for a two-bedroom home would cost about ₹1.5 lakh; a three-bedroom needs ₹1.5-2 lakh, while a four-bedroom could cost up to ₹2.5 lakh.

Wired automation for a three-bedroom, on the other hand, is more expensive and can cost ₹6 lakh. Wired automation is done at the construction stage whereas wireless automation is about retrofitting an older home. The sluggishness in adoption may be changing—at least home automation companies believe so.

From being luxury, the market may get more democratized because these companies, which include a host of startups, are trying to price it right. In some cases, capital expenditure, which is made upfront by homeowners, is being converted into an operational expense. Piggybacking on such efforts, the market is expected to grow