Moving Smart Homes? Here Are the Decisions to Make and Steps to Take

When you have a smart home, moving out has an added element of complexity. There are two decisions to make, and nine steps you should take to ensure the smoothest possible handover to the new owner.

Decisions to Make

Moving house is stressful at the best of times, let alone when you’re trying to decide how to handle a smart home setup that you’ve tailored to your residence. Here are some questions you might want to ask.

Should You Include Smart Home Kit in a Sale?

Attitudes to smart homes can vary tremendously, and the most important factor here may be that of your buyer.

For some, it can be a key part of the appeal, and they will expect most or all of the devices to remain installed. Others may be ambivalent, not too concerned whether things stay or go with you. Others may actively dislike smart homes, seeing it as an unwanted complexity—and will want to ensure it’s all removed and replaced with dumb equivalents before they move in.

If the buyer isn’t concerned one way or the other, and you intend to make your new home smart, then it will of course make sense to take most of it with you. Even if you can’t use all of it in your new home, selling unwanted kit can help with the often substantial expenses involved in moving home.

What to Leave, What to Take?

If the buyer is ambivalent, it may be worth thinking about the relative costs and effort involved in relocating different types of smart home kit.

At one end of the scale are completely standalone devices like robot vacuum cleaners. Few buyers would expect this sort of thing to be included in the sale, and there’s very little setup effort on your part once you reach your new home: plug it in and leave it to learn the new layout.

The same is true of smart speakers, smart plugs, and smart bulbs—which are trivial to swap over to dumb ones.

At the other end of the scale are things like wired-in smart switches. If you don’t have the DIY skills (or legal capacity) to do the job yourself, you may be better off leaving them in place. The combined parts and labor cost of having someone remove and replace with dumb switches may well exceed the cost of a replacement. Besides, there may be even better ones available now.

Something I would always recommend removing, even if you do have to pay someone else to do it, are smart locks. In that way, the buyer is assured that nobody else can unlock their home, and you’re not left with any potential liability if anything goes wrong. Plus a lock is a lock, and you can probably find a use for it in your new place.

Steps to Take for Smart Home Kit Left in Place

Let’s say you’ve decided it’s easier to leave your smart home equipment in situ, and the buyer prefers (or is willing to pay extra for) this outcome. Here are some tips to make that process easier.

Create a New Smart Home User

If you’re leaving any smart home kit in place, the new owner will expect it to be functional. The easiest way to achieve this is to create a new smart home user, and to give that user access to the home. This is as simple as creating a new account and passing the login details to the new owner.

If you simply add that owner to the home, then everything which stays will remain fully functional. Taking this approach does mean that you continue to have control also, which brings us to the next point …

Leave Factory Resets to the New Owner

You may hear people advise doing a full factory reset of all the devices remaining in the home, and then deleting the home. In that way, everything is left for the new owner to set up from scratch, and they have the reassurance of knowing nobody else has control.

However, the downside of that is nothing will work when the new owner moves in. This doesn’t create a great first impression, and potentially creates a lot of work for them on day one just to do things like control the lights.

Worse, they may view you as a tech support person for their new setup. You may find yourself trying to do remote troubleshooting and IT support just when you need to be getting on with unpacking and configuring your own home.

For this reason, I strongly recommend leaving factory resets to the new owner. Sure, offer them the option of doing this before you leave, but make sure they understand the downsides, and that you’re clear that you’ll likely be too busy to help.

Create a Video Guide (You’ll Be Glad You Did!)

Assuming you leave the new owners with a working smart home, I strongly recommend creating a quick video guide—again to ensure you don’t end up on the wrong end of tech support calls.

It needn’t be anything complex or time-consuming. Just take your smartphone camera on a walk through the home, operating all the smart switches and control panels so that they know where they all are and what they do. In that way, they’ll have something to consult without bothering you.

Schedule a Run-Through for the New Owner

Ideally, supplement the video with an in-person run-through for the new owner, where you walk around the home with them and have them operate all the controls themselves. There’s no substitute for hands-on experience.

Steps to Take for Smart Home Devices Coming With You

Alternatively, you’ve decided to box up your smart home gadgets and use them in your next property. Here are some things you should keep in mind.

Remove Devices Digitally First, Physically Second

There are two steps to removing a smart home device. One, removing it from smart home apps (for example, removing it from HomeKit). Two, physically removing the accessory. If you do the latter but not the former, the apps will be left with error messages for unresponsive devices.

For that reason, I recommend a systematic approach. Remove the device from the app, and immediately afterward physically remove the hardware. This approach also guards against anything being forgotten.

Replace Smart Lights and Bulbs With Dumb Ones

It’s usually a legal requirement to leave a new owner with standard light fixtures, so if you remove any smart lights, then you’ll need to replace them with at least a basic fixture—which in some cases can be as simple as a hanging bulb-holder.

Leaving light bulbs may not be a legal requirement, but it would be a pretty unfriendly thing to leave the new owner without any lights, so just replace smart bulbs with dumb equivalents.

Remove Smart Switches, Replacing Where Required

As mentioned, it won’t always make sense to remove wired-in smart switches, but where it does, then these need to be replaced with dumb ones.

Of course, if you’ve used things like Philips Hue Switches, with the original hard-wired switches still in place, then all you have to do is remove these. The same is true of smart switch enclosures that simply snap over the top of the wired ones.

Ensure Locks Remain Functional

If you’re removing smart locks, then you naturally need to ensure that the locks remain functional using keys.

Many modern smart locks make this easy, as the exterior remains untouched, and you simply fit a motorized unit over the existing interior latch. But if you had to remove any lock hardware to fit a smart lock, then this will need to be replaced.

Take Special Care With Smart Plugs

Finally, it’s really easy to forget to remove smart plugs! These may have been permanently plugged into an outlet for years, and are often out of sight. If you’ve followed my advice to remove devices digitally first, and physically second, then you’ll have an automatic reminder to unplug them.

The above approach should ensure a trouble-free handover to the new owner, leaving you free to focus on creating your new (smart) home.