So we may be moving -
Has anyone else navigated the waters of transitioning smart home?
I’m thinking it’s not worth uninstalling all of my devices and reinstalling dumb devices - but also I’ve invested a significant amount of time (and some money) into getting everything right.
Do folks sell the house “as-is” with smarts and try to increase price, or do they remove them all and sell like every other house?
I did this a couple of years ago… I ended up pulling out almost everything in spite of attempting to sell it as is. At the end of the day the maintenance and lack of reliability of the vera tipped the balance and forced me to pull almost everything out. It is sad but it’s the reality. The only things I left were devices which could be manually activated and which I did not need in the new house.
I initially intended on asking for a bit more money for it but realized that it was actually depreciating the house.
My story would be quite different now that I am vera free…
lol - that sounds a lot like my wife’s response. Too many issues to sell it as a perk. Almost everything I have though is able to be activated with manual switch - aside from the horizontal blind motors. My two main points for leaving it:
pain in the butt to remove (and unprogram) them all and reinstall dumb (particularly the 3 & 4-way)
Gives me a chance to get updated and similar devices (so many different versions/models right now)
So what do you use for controller to run the house now?
An existent home automation setup could definetly raise the price of the property. Yes, you might have some issues when going deep into customising your home with advanced scenes and plugins. But your home is now personalized to suit you and your expectations.
Leave your setup clean of any unecessary automation and remove unused plugins and your setup should not require mainaintace.Leave the personalization to the new owner.
I personally have more than 40 z-wave nodes around my hub and not went too advanced into things. Everything works just as as I set it up almost two years ago. Outside lights turn off at sunset and they turn on at sunrise. My heating turns off when I leave home, so on so forth.
This should answer your question:
I think if I were you, I would leave everything but the vera then. You could just eBay it out.
Sorry I am going to contradict you. The vera is the key difference and limiter between home automation adding value and depreciating. The more customization and the more automation, the higher the value you can get. Keeping it simple in your case is to make sure that it doesn’t show too often that it is broken. It’s a matter of when, not if.
Like selling a house including contents, you see it as plus but unfortunately the new owner doesn’t like your taste in furnishings and sees it as a cost to him to have to dispose of these items.
While home automation is still in the realms of “hobbyist” your standard house purchaser will see no major benefit purchasing your home with your home automation system included. In fact you may find down the line that the new owner is contacting you a little too frequently with the same problems that you encountered. It now becomes a liability to you after the event.
Weigh up your options. Buy cheap and inexpensive dumb replacements and take your system with you. All you need to do is to install your current system in your new house. A lot cheaper than starting from scratch again. Plus you’ll never have to answer queries from the new owner on the subject.
Last property I sold, I left all of the X10 light switches in the wall without giving the new occupant any controllers. (Kept 'em all, still got 'em!) They always wondered why their light switches were so weird (e.g. pushbuttons and push-to-dim paddles) and constantly stopped working (cheap internal components == premature failure).
So I promised them I’d pay for any new (traditional) switches as old ones died, lol. 
hahaha!
Yeah I’m leaning towards the same. There are so many things at this point - including stuff like 2 different kinds of shades that are motorized (~15 total) that no longer have a manual method, like a string. I’d literally have to buy new shades or remove them as they’d not function without the controller. Then I’ve got every single light/plug in lamp. I’d literally have to rewire almost every single junction box in the house. My wife said, I’d take a couple hours and do that - I replied with it’s more like several days non-stop.
I’ll try to sell them as perk and remove all the scenes/plugins (and as @Sorin suggested), allowing them to figure out the automations they want. Even if I could get $2k out of the entire thing, i’d be worth it since it would save me so much time. I basically just want to help cover the cost of repurchase.
I’d definitely try to keep it arms distance because if I became a helper in questions, etc. that would never cease.
Yep, I agree. Remove them or hide them. I discourage anyone that sees my automated house to go into my very same direction, because you’ll need to learn how to troubleshoot linux, lua, Zwave and many more things. It’s simply not ready for prime time and I understand why people are OK with just some Hue Bulbs and Alexa controls…
The last property I sold I had just 10 devices, mostly for roller shutters, so it was easy. Now I’m approaching 100 and I have many things automated with no buttons at all, especially outdoor lights and indoor shades. It’s barely working for me and I don’t want to have people calling me (as my wife does…) because a perfectly fine scene was missed, or a device was dropped from the controller with no apparent reasons…
When we moved house 2 years ago I took eveything out as the buyer did not want to pay extra and I did some maths to work out what it would all cost me to replace! Fibaro units behind switches were easy to remove and useful in new house.i left them a somfy blind with a manual control (it would not fit window in new house) and an external light that could be controlled from inside which was impossible without the zwave switch. To make that function left them an old Vera hub and upgraded ours in new house. I imagine they probably don’t even use that now and have no idea how to fix if goes wrong.
I think as others have sod it depends on the buyers if they are excited by the stuff they will pay at least the cost of the bits, if not they will want it gone as won’t understand it or value it.
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