From the smart home to fixed-wing drones, Coldwell Banker’s chief marketing officer, Sean Blankenship, gave a rundown of the top tech tools at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2016.
Please see the entire transcript of Sean’s talk below:
From the smart home to fixed wing drones here’s the latest tech coming. Please welcome Coldwell Banker Chief Marketing Officer Sean Blankenship.
Alright the diehards are here. How’s everybody doing? Good. Alright let’s talk a little bit about CES. First of all who’s been to the Consumer Electronics Show? Just curious. Alright not a lot of people, just a few over here. Alright. Just to give you a little backdrop. We went out there, it’s been a couple of weeks. It’s the first week in January. And imagine 2.5 million square feet of exhibit space. 150 different countries are represented. They do over 300 conference sessions. It is the Super Bowl of technology. So you’re probably wondering. Okay so what does that have to do with real estate?
Well let me give you sort of an idea first of all what’s represented there this year, what’s really happening in technology.
Virtual reality is just booming right now. It’s taking off. Robotics, okay A.I. Who’s heard about what Facebook is going to do, what Mark Zuckerberg’s going to do with A.I. in his home? Anybody read that one? So it’s impacting home. Drones.
Alright we’re all familiar with drones whether we use them or not. Drones are huge. And there are now drone catchers. Drones are out of control so now we’ve got drone catchers. It’s unbelievable. Mobile TV. I’m going to show you some stuff on TV. But the biggest thing that’s happening right now is smart home technology, which is why I’m here, which is why we were there.
Smart home technology was not something that was even talked about probably 18 months ago. In fact one of our partners, CNET, didn’t even have a smart home technology section, which they do now. So it’s just taken off, it’s exploded. Leading up to it and I know I’m not supposed to do a commercial but you need to have some understanding of what’s happening. We did some research. We released it on January 4th of what consumers and what the real estate industry is seeing within the smart home sector. So just to give you an idea how big this is exploding right now.
65% of buyers are asking for smart, about or what is smart home technology and the implications it’s having on home. It’s not just for the rich and shameless anymore. And it’s not for early adopters. It’s big. And the price points have come down which push down to your average buyer. So that’s important to know as well. About 50% of consumers today already have smart home technology. And that’s going to go up in 2016. Who here has smart home technology in their home right now? I bet you a lot of you do, right? And most people don’t even realize it but you probably bought a smart home TV like three or four years ago. Right? You may not use it. But that’s kind of like if you think about entertainment that is your entryway into smart home technology.
And the research that we’ve posted also says that sellers are willing to invest up to $3,000 on smart home technology if it’ll help reduce days on market and the average sales price. So they’re willing to put their money out. So that has implications on what you guys do every day as well.
So it’s really, really, it’s happening fast. I’m here to sort of just lighten the load a little bit for a Friday morning. You guys are probably all thinking about your plane schedules. So let’s talk a little bit about what we saw in the space that’s kind of cool. Alright? Let’s start with the luxurious.
I’m probably going to screw this up because this stuff is so technical it’s really hard to get your mind around. This is an LG OLID, okay, Organic Light Illuminating Diode. Who knew that? Who has one, by the way? Alright so this is a 77”. This is 4mm wide. Each pixel they can control and illuminate each pixel at a time. So you know how the whole thing about a plasma versus LED and the black, black lid or whatever they call it? So this is the ultimate. But that’s it right there, 4 mm. So that’s coming. That’s about $10,000 right now. So you know give it a couple of years it’ll be $5,000. Alright.
Another thing that’s really amazing, this is from LG again. Check this out. It’s like paper. It’s 1mm thin. It’s film. You can roll it up and put it in your pocket. Right? It’s a TV you can roll up and put in your pocket. It’s very, very cool. So think about its application. Who has a smart watch on right now? Smart watch applications. Think about your car, think about your dash. You’ve got this big navigation flat screen.
Imagine if it’s now molded and rolls and forms around your dash. It’s pretty cool. Automotive application is taking off there. Alright what do we got next? The affordable.
So get this. Who has a Nest? Not a lot of people. Okay. Well if you don’t want to spend the money on a Nest you can now get a Roost battery. What’s a Roost battery? It pretty much does the same thing. It connects to your wi-fi, talks to your phone, let’s you know when the batteries getting low so you don’t wake up at 2 a.m. trying to figure out which smoke alarm is going off in your house and driving you nuts. Right? 35 bucks you plug it in. Now you can bring old school to new school. Very cool. Alright what else did we see?
What’s useful? This is one I want to get, but I haven’t got it yet. This is from Amazon. Who has the Echo? Anybody have the Echo yet? Alexa? Is she cool? She’s getting smarter too. She listens, learns, talks back. Right? Is it pretty reliable? Yeah. Now I guess you can do your seven minute workout in the morning. Apparently. I have no idea. But it’s cool because it connects on different platforms, which is another huge area that needs to be developed in the smart home category is different platforms.
Apple’s got a platform home kit. I think Amazon’s got its own platform. Samsung bought the internet, I forgot exactly. So there’s different platforms. So what you’re seeing right now is a competition over platforms. But this is very cool.
Let’s see, the smartest. What did we see that was the smartest? Ecobee. So I mentioned Nest. Ecobee takes it to another level. So Ecobee is like Nest. Right? It alerts you. You can set, it’ll know when you come and go. For those of you who have Nest you know that. Right? It knows when you come and go. That way if you travel and it starts to freeze it won’t turn off and your pipes freeze. But Eco now has a sensor for every room. So now it’ll know each room, not just floors. So it’s taken a whole other level of managing the temperature of your home.
And then this one was just bizarre. CleverPet. Okay you’re probably wondering what is this? Who has pets? Who has dogs when you feel guilty you leave the house because they’re in a crate all day? Alright. CleverPet now is interactive games for your pet. I kid you not. This thing is wild. It uses sound, it uses a little screen, it releases dry dogfood so they can play games. So it has like a squirrel game where the dog can literally chase a squirrel, hit the right button and get rewarded with dry dogfood. Oh by the way you can watch and say, “Hello” to your dog while you’re at work. So that’s just completely bizarre.
Alright that’s it. How was that for Friday morning? Easy? (Clapping) So check out about smart home. You can read our blog. You can go anywhere on CNET. Check it out. It’s real. It’s happening to our industry. I encourage you to get involved.
Thank you very much. Have a great Friday. Safe travels.
