Study: Smart home offerings drive resi security

DALLAS—Smart home offerings have boosted residential security by more than 15 percent in the past two years, according to Parks Associates in its report, “The New Face of Home Security—2015 Edition.”

Smart home offerings also lower attrition rates, CEO Trisha Parks told Security Systems News. “Attrition is the enemy,” she said. “The industry is facing its monsters.”

About 21 million U.S. homes have professionally monitored security and another 1.5 million have monitoring in a second home, Parks said. “Security was in a bind,” she said, but smart home was the agent to move it forward.

By the end of this year, nearly 6 million professionally monitored homes will have smart home control, the report said. That is due in part to big companies such as Vivint, AT&T and ADT aggressively marketing their smart home offerings with their systems.

“Security households are 150 percent more likely than non-security households to state that they keep up with technological innovations and like to own the latest devices," Tom Kerber, Parks' director of research, home controls land energy, said in a prepared statement.

And the services will only get better and expand into new areas, she said, such as connecting to sprinkler systems and the like, she said.

Parks Associates will examine adoption of home security systems and convergence with the smart home at the tenth annual CONNECTIONS Summit: IoT, Entertainment, and the Connected Consumer at CES 2016, Jan. 6-7, in Las Vegas. The event will feature two days of panel discussions on the smart home, Internet of Things, and connected entertainment, with trends and implications for connected consumers and opportunities for companies to build new revenues and innovative business models.