France’s leading integrated real estate group, with business operations in all areas of real estate development and services (residential and commercial real estate, real estate services to individuals and companies, distribution networks, client relations, and major urban projects), Nexity aims to serve the full range of real estate needs through a strong presence in all cycles (short, medium, and long term).
Interview with Pierre-Gilles Vermeire, Smart Home Offer Director at Nexity.
1. What is Nexity’s vision for automating homes and buildings?
Thanks to information technology and connected equipment, the cities of tomorrow will become increasingly smarter. Data collection and use will make it possible to manage all buildings and living spaces cohesively.
Nexity wants to make the most of all the technological innovations offered by Smart Homes, Smart Buildings, and Smart Cities to offer new services and uses to its customers.
With Eugénie, Nexity has developed a selection of digital services that connect residents to their home, their property manager, their neighbors, and their neighborhood.
2. How do you address the challenges of interoperability in your smart homes?
The smallest unit of a Smart City, the connected home or Smart Home is the springboard for a more connected city.
Because technology is advancing at an increasingly faster rate, Nexity designed its smart homes for the long term by making them technology agnostic.
Interoperability in smart homes is much more than a challenge, but a clear prerequisite.
Nexity currently provides its smart homes with a backbone that can support all current and future technologies and protocols.
3. Growth in the smart home market depends on value-added services. What does Nexity offer in this area?
At Nexity, we look at connected homes as much more than the smart home market itself. We’ve designed an all-in-one solution for connecting residents not just to their home, but to their property manager, their neighbors, and their neighborhood.
In creating this solution, we needed to identify services that residents would find useful and then make them visible and accessible within a mobile app.
That means that we offer services:
- At the individual home level, to simplify daily life and control energy consumption
- At the building level, to make it easier to access useful information
- At the neighborhood level, to help people form social connections
These services are obviously expected to evolve over time.
4. How has Overkiz helped with your connected projects?
Overkiz helped us develop the “smart home” part of Eugénie by giving us what we needed:
- Bring together all connected features for homes, buildings, property management companies, and neighborhoods in a single Nexity mobile app
- Offer home-based and remote control of connected items (shutters, lighting, heating, smoke detection, and energy consumption monitoring)
- Provide a home automation box for each apartment
- Allow new equipment to be added
- Supply and install hardware through a national network of installers, along with technical support
- Support remote control and maintenance of the installed system
5. How have you benefited from this collaboration?
Because they offer services, hardware, technology, and maintenance, Overkiz is the only company capable of meeting all of Nexity’s needs related to smart homes. In addition to meeting our needs, this partnership also allowed us to focus on our core business of providing useful services to residents.
We were therefore able to focus on building simple customer experiences to help residents adapt to Eugénie and incorporate it into their daily lives.
6. What are your plans for technological innovation in the coming months and years?
Without revealing too much about our future plans, Nexity wants to build upon Eugénie by offering services that provide even greater comfort and make cities more inclusive.
We intend to continue taking advantage of technological innovations that benefit residents. This will require new smart features and ever more new services.
Nexity’s Key Figures
#1 property services platform for individuals, companies, and communities
10,000 employees
€4.1 billion in sales in 2018
890,000 managed residential properties
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