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Builder M/I Homes Puts Clare Controls Technology in 3,000 Houses in the U.S.
By Gordon Isaac
What do you get when a home builder, an
electrical company, and a home automation
manufacturer all come together with a focus on
providing the best customer experience?
This year at the International Builder Show
(IBS) in Las Vegas, I visited with Jason Collman,
VP of sales for Clare Controls, to learn more
about how Clare was working with builders to
help make it easier for them to provide their
new home customers with the latest technology.
Collman shared several success stories with
builders throughout the country and suggested
that I don’t just take his word for it, but that I
visit with one of his builder partners, M/I
Homes, which is going to be putting Clare in
around 3,000 homes around the country this
year. So, I went to Houston, where the
relationship started, to learn more about how
builders are using Clare Controls products to
provide added value to their customers
purchasing a new home.
Clare Controls has been around since 2010
and has gone through many changes during that
time. Recently, the Clare team has started to
refocus the company and streamlined the
product line with imbedded wireless security so
production builders could offer to their buyers a
solution once only available to custom home
buyers. This offering would provide a premium
smart home experience at a fair price, with no
strings attached.
Clare’s new approach has clearly been working
well over the past few years as the company is
currently doing business with nearly 300 dealers
nationally and will have around 20,000 smarthome
controllers installed this year alone based
on their builder’s new projects pipeline. Now
with their new partnership with SnapAV, they
are expecting those numbers to grow.
Research has shown that 80 percent of new
home buyers feel that smart-home technology
should be included in the home, and 75 percent
of customers surveyed said that if they were
deciding between two different homes, smarthome
technology would be the deciding factor
for making their purchase. The challenge for
36 Residential Tech Today | July/August 2019
many builders has been that as land prices have
increased along with building materials in some
areas, adding the cost of technology to the home
as a standard has had the perception of being
too expensive, too complicated, or too difficult
for the builder to service. The end result, often
times, was a customer that paid more for their
home, yet had problems using the technology
installed in it, leaving a negative impression of
the builder.
To try and address these problems, many
builders have experimented with using bigname
products like Amazon Alexa, Nest, Ring,
and others to attract customers. However, these
DIY-type products often carry a premium price
point for their respective category and are really
designed for the homeowner to service. Some
builders have tried to use security-based systems
with smart home features or other bundled
systems that require a recurring monthly fee to
help cover the cost of the equipment. Many
customers didn’t like having another monthly
bill for their technology and in many cases, this
led to a poor customer experience and caused
problems for the builder and all involved.
The partnership with M/I Homes and Clare
Controls started with one of the nation’s largest
electrical companies, IES Holdings (formerly
Integrated Electrical Services), which has 29
locations around the country and trades
publicly as IESC. Chris Brunner, the North
Houston division manager, is responsible for
this fast-growing division, which does around
300 homes a month. IES North Houston had
been doing electrical work with M/I Homes for
many years when Brunner saw the opportunity
to improve his partnership with the builder by
providing low-voltage installations, as well. This
IES branch had begun offering low-voltage
services to its customers several years ago, when