"This year, we found that the desire for smart homes in the UK population remains very high, with nearly 80% of respondents considering a move in the next five years saying they want a smart home"
- Mark Seaman - Samsung
The last few years have seen significant attention on increasing energy costs. While the rapid rises seen during the cost-of-living crisis are now abating, and the energy price cap set by Ofgem is starting to fall, current rates remain much higher than two years ago.
In fact, according to the House of Commons Research Briefing on Energy Prices, the energy price cap in July 2024 is still around 29%, or £350, above summer 2021 levels.
While there may be good news on the horizon for household energy spend, we’re not out of the woods yet and consumers should still consider how best to make the most of their energy usage. They need to be supported in finding the homes that help them do this.
However, this is easier said than done. While there have been a lot of energy-saving tips and tricks published online, they may not always deliver real savings and guidance can sometimes be quite obvious. A standard piece of advice is to ‘turn off lights’—something that should be common sense, regardless of whether someone is concerned about their electricity bills.
In other cases, the counsel being given may require more drastic changes that aren’t always practical. The challenge is for people to be able to save on energy but also to heat or power their homes adequately, enjoying their lives without making significant sacrifices.
It should therefore not be a surprise that people are turning to technology to find ways to help them tackle this issue. In June 2024, we released the Smart Home Buyers Index 2024 (SHBI). This is an annual piece of research that looks at consumer attitudes towards smart homes and smart technology, seeking to understand the landscape and track the momentum of the smart home movement.
This year, we found that the desire for smart homes in the UK population remains very high, with nearly 80% of respondents considering a move in the next five years saying they want a smart home.
Perhaps more interestingly, the main reason that people were looking for these homes was because they wanted to improve energy efficiency. A full 70% of respondents said this was important to them, and a further 63% said they wanted to save money overall. People looking for smart homes have a very clear purpose in mind for the technology they’re looking to use.
While they’re actually willing to pay more for a smart home—the SHBI showed potential movers are prepared to pay around 7.7% more than the average UK house price for a smart home—they want to be able to get this back as savings throughout their time in the property, particularly when it comes to energy usage.
This desire for energy efficiency has been born out through our analysis of internet searches over the last year, which showed appliances such as air source heat pumps seeing the highest search volumes across all categories of smart devices. And the industry is responding. Earlier this year, Samsung partnered with British Gas to integrate SmartThings Energy with British Gas PeakSave, helping users make their homes more energy-efficient with less intervention.
The Samsung partnership with ABB and SMA in Brobyholm, Sweden, is also looking to demonstrate some of the ways that people can use smart technology to maximise their energy efficiency. The more developers can consider the right implementation of technology, the more they will be able to meet consumer needs, generating better ROI on homes.
The desire for connected living is unlikely to go away and applies to all age groups. The SHBI found that 88% of respondents aged over 65 wanted a smart home because they felt it would help with their energy efficiency—larger than any other age category. The UK population is ageing and there has been consistent growth in the UK Retirement Housing market from 2019 to 2024.
This demographic is one that should not be ignored and will increase in importance. The news that some pensioners may no longer receive winter fuel payments will likely only continue to place focus on older people and their energy use.
However, the focus on energy efficiency doesn’t come only from consumers and home occupiers. Sustainability in construction has been a key topic for some time. Developers should already be considering how they can build homes that make the best use of energy, whether this is when they’re building new projects or retrofitting existing ones.
Making sure that they’re taking a digital-first approach and creating future-proof, smart homes is one way that they can effectively meet requirements.
Statista predicts that the smart home market will show a compound annual growth rate of 11.66% between 2024 and 2028 and generate projected revenues of approximately £8.6bn in 2024 alone.
This, coupled with an increasing desire from consumers for the technology that will help them with their energy efficiency, there is a clear opportunity for the industry to respond and continue to explore connected living and support consumers by responding to their direct needs.
