ellesshoo Posted January 28, 2013 Posted January 28, 2013 What have you done or plan to do with all your HA/Insteon stuff when you sell a house or move? As cool as it may look when your house is being shown I imagine all the Insteon stuff wouldn't do much to increase the selling price and unless the buyer is already into this sort of thing would end up getting really annoyed with things that may have suited your lifestyle but they can't quite figure out why lights keep turning off behind them. Am I wrong on this? While part of me thinks "I don't want to re-buy a bunch of stuff, I'm ripping it out and taking it with me!" the other part says "if it makes up for it in sell price why not get all new stuff w/ latest rev firmware etc". Was wondering what others have done in this situation. I'm not selling a home right now but I'm starting to realize the substantial $$ I've put into things and wondering what I will do when faced with this.
oberkc Posted January 28, 2013 Posted January 28, 2013 I can only speculate, but I would be inclined to take it with me if needing to sell soon. But...everything is up for negotiation.
arw01 Posted January 29, 2013 Posted January 29, 2013 I would think if you have integrated sprinkers, cameras, and touch screens around the home, then you could use it as a selling point in the pricing. But I would make a counter taking that all out of the price, but keeping it on my side if I was the buyer! Maybe with the dashboards and outside apps, we can get some <$100 tablets to mount on the walls for camera access etc. Alan
madcodger Posted January 29, 2013 Posted January 29, 2013 When we sold about 2.5 years ago we left it, but I don't know whether it really added much to the sales price or not. However, the Insteon lighting, keypads, whole house audio, etc., had become so much a part of the house "experience" it would have been hard to say that it wouldn't stay. So, I left the Elk, Insteon, WH audio, etc., and just started over with everything. only problem (which wasn't really that bad) was that I had to walk new owner through things when there was a question, for about two years. Took a call about once every 4 months.
ellesshoo Posted January 29, 2013 Author Posted January 29, 2013 When we sold about 2.5 years ago we left it, but I don't know whether it really added much to the sales price or not. However, the Insteon lighting, keypads, whole house audio, etc., had become so much a part of the house "experience" it would have been hard to say that it wouldn't stay. So, I left the Elk, Insteon, WH audio, etc., and just started over with everything. only problem (which wasn't really that bad) was that I had to walk new owner through things when there was a question, for about two years. Took a call about once every 4 months. Tech support for 2 years?! That's definitely a deal breaker for me. I'm at the point where I basically wouldn't even buy an electronic gadget to give anyone at Christmas/birthday because I'm so sick of being their tech support.
arw01 Posted January 29, 2013 Posted January 29, 2013 +1 on that! Used to do tech support on the side, making house calls, etc. Even when it was free it was never fast enough, got tired of the nagging and just stopped doing it over time. I would hope the new homeowner knows something about basic household wiring, because the joint I got here is not consistent from box to box, let along trying to troubleshoot remotely a communications problem or something else. Just think of trying to explain that they need a filter for $20 on anything electronic they plug in!
Xathros Posted January 29, 2013 Posted January 29, 2013 I took all of my gear with me when I sold and moved. I thought about leaving it but I didn't really want to support it from here and I would have had to reprogram the whole place for much less automation before I left. -Xathros
elvisimprsntr Posted January 29, 2013 Posted January 29, 2013 The the time it would take to remove it and install the standard switch/outlets, only to install it again somewhere else doesn't seem worth it to me. I'd rather install new stuff at a new house. I'd probably take my new ISY994i and give them my old 99i. Then point them to the a few sites or hand them the phone number to smarthome.com who will roll a truck.
RichTJ99 Posted January 29, 2013 Posted January 29, 2013 I just sold my house & having a number of keypads around the house with the smarthome custom buttons made it look much fancier than it was. Plus, its nice to have one button to turn on all the outside lights. I say leave it. In this housing market, if it helps move your home one month sooner, and one mortgage payment sooner, its probably worth it. On the other hand, they had a 4 year old son, taking my 4 year old sons room. I had put a LGB train on the ceiling & my son loved it, the new owners wanted me to take it down - different strokes for different folks.
carealtor Posted January 30, 2013 Posted January 30, 2013 I'm in the exact situation the OP describes. We will be putting our home on the market soon. I just can't see leaving it behind, or even having it installed when showing, because the chances of a potential home buyer also being a HA hobbiest are slim to none. But I too consider leaving it behind because I'm interested in installing micro modules behind standard switches in our new house. What I think I'm going to do is take it all out and put everything back to "normal" and then sell what I can on ebay. Then buy new stuff for the new house.
madcodger Posted January 30, 2013 Posted January 30, 2013 Carealtor makes a good point - it might be best to remove HA eqpt before showing the house. As for my two years of tech support... Two houses ago we sold to a couple moving to PA from across the country. We ended up inviting them to Christmas eve dinner PRIOR to closing but after settling on the terms, which our realtors thought was insane. That was almost 10 years ago, and they are now/still very close friends (and the wife works part-time for my wife now). We're back at our old house fairly often... For the more recent automated house, it was a younger couple who were also very nice. I'd handle the question via phone, email or text or stop by and solve something then have a beer on my old back porch (maybe twice in two years for that). We've even had them to parties we've hosted. I can see how it could be a nightmare, but we've had good luck selling houses, automated or not.
johnnyt Posted January 30, 2013 Posted January 30, 2013 Anyone try or think about selling with the stuff in and some help getting started but then making it clear their services cost $40-$50 / hr after? Sent from my iPod touch using Tapatalk
arw01 Posted January 30, 2013 Posted January 30, 2013 Anyone try or think about selling with the stuff in and some help getting started but then making it clear their services cost $40-$50 / hr after? Ah, but it's just a quick question Johnny, only take you a couple of minutes... and then you realize it is something you never figured out yourself, or you didn't finish it right the first time!
ellesshoo Posted January 31, 2013 Author Posted January 31, 2013 After reading all the responses I think I would consider leaving it behind but severely dumb things down to avoid any and all "lights going off on people" or other non-braindead intuitive functions. I would also limit everything to insteon scenes and take the central controller out of the equation. The guy who said if it sells a month or two earlier makes it worth it is right, one ore even 2 extra months on the market can easily cost me/you more than the cost of the HA hardware. Of course if a buyer just doesn't want it as part of the sale then I'd gladly take it with me. I definitely wouldn't want a buyer thinking they deserve a lower sale price in that event though, I certainly wouldn't base themy sale price on the fact that there is automation in the house so I wouldn't want them using the removal of it as a bargaining point.
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