Does Smart Home Tech Make You A Better Short-Term Rental Host?

For my money, the best horror film ever made was the 2012 movie, “The Cabin in the Woods.” A group of teenagers go on vacation to a cabin in the woods, only to find themselves terrorized, and slowly knocked off, by a series of horrible zombie monsters. Unbeknownst to them, the entire zombie monster operation is being run by a group of engineers who are surveilling their every move from a clandestine lab. The engineers are also technologically manipulating the events that trigger the release of the zombie monsters. It doesn’t end well for anyone.

I think of this film every time I try to decide whether we should install smart-home surveillance and control technology at our short-term rental property. I waffle back and forth between the advantages of having a remote view into the operation of the home, and the knowledge that I may be stepping onto a slippery slope that inevitably leads to zombie monsters.

Owning a short-term rental is fraught. The revenue is nice, but it’s a lot of work and worry. Landlords are completely at the mercy of a rotating cast of renters. Also, stuff happens in a house you don’t occupy full-time that can wreak holy havoc if left undetected. Smart-home tech, like smoke, fire and carbon-monoxide detectors that automatically alert responders, water heater monitors, and flood detectors can stop a situation going from bad to worse. This tech is firmly in the “benevolent” category.

Where I get conflicted is with the clandestine lab/evil engineer-type stuff.

Some short-term landlords have installed so much smart-home tech that they can, theoretically, observe their renters almost everywhere in the house, track who comes and goes, control the lights, air conditioning, heat and window shades, monitor their Netflix consumption, view the contents of the refrigerator, and reduce the water pressure to a dribble. They can lock renters out of the house entirely. Smart-home tech can’t unleash zombie monsters yet, but that’s probably coming in the next generation of the Amazon Echo.

While I love the idea of having a layer of oversight and protection over my rental property, I’m not sure I should possess the power that all that smart-home tech provides. Here’s why:

Obsessiontown. Population, Me: Web-enabled, real-time video surveillance, recorded on a remote server, is a proven way to reduce break-ins at vacation rentals, and, at the very least, gives landlords a chance to identify and prosecute perps.

But how do I stop watching?

If I got 24/7 access to a live feed of the comings and goings at our largest single asset, I’d never get anything else in my life done. I’d be reduced to a bleary-eyed gamer, staring unblinking at the action on my computer screen, afraid to look away lest I miss something: a criminal with a crowbar trying to break down the front door, a flurry of guests clearly dressed for a rave, someone smuggling in a pet tiger even though we have a very specific “no pets” policy, the progress on the crown of thorns plant by the front door. (It hasn’t been doing well.) Then, inevitably, I’d start going all evil engineer. How much would the renters freak out if I lowered the shades in the living room while they’re sitting there? What would happen if I made the pool really cold one day and really warm the next? How would they react to having only basic cable for eight hours? Hammer-hard water pressure, then just dribbles? I wouldn’t sleep. I wouldn’t eat. I’d just mess with them ALL DAY. Now, I am become Zombie Monster, destroyer of vacations.

Clearly, I couldn’t handle that kind of power.

It’s gross: Home-security systems are nothing new, but it’s a different ballgame when you’re surveilling your short-term rental, because you are, by definition, watching the daily activities of strangers. This is creepy. Clandestine lab creepy.

Short-term renters, like all tenants, have a legal expectation of privacy. Airbnb and other short-term rental companies have policies about what hosts can and cannot surveil at their property. Hosts are also required to disclose to renters the location of any surveillance.

But people forget about such things when night falls and alcohol begins to flow. Do I REALLY want to see what my renters are doing in the pool or on the couch at night? Nope. Don’t watch, you say? Please see the “Obsessiontown” item above.

Ignorance is still bliss: Dumb homes are more vulnerable than smart homes to many things. But I’ll bet the owners of dumb homes have less grey hair. They’re not sitting around, watching the feed, waiting for the big scary thing to happen, second guessing everything they see. Last winter, some friends of mine learned there was a raging party taking place at their rental property, complete with fire dancers juggling lit torches on the patio, which is covered with wooden furniture and other highly flammable things. It was still happening when they learned about it, but damage had already been done. If they had seen the fire dancers arrive on a video feed, they might have been able to get their property manager there fast enough to shut it down, but the only way they could have done that was to be glued to a video-surveillance feed at all times. That’s no way to live.

I’ll keep my home dumb. I will let the campers frolic unobserved at my cabin in the woods. That way, if some zombie monsters do show up, I can honestly say I didn’t see them coming. And I know I didn’t send them.

There has been a substantial increase in the number of Australians earning high incomes who are renting their homes instead of owning them, and this may be another element contributing to higher market demand and continually rising rents, according to new research.

The portion of households with an annual income of $140,000 per year (in 2021 dollars), went from 8 percent of the private rental market in 1996 to 24 percent in 2021, according to research by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). The AHURI study highlights that longer-term declines in the rate of home ownership in Australia are likely the cause of this trend.

The biggest challenge this creates is the flow-on effect on lower-income households because they may face stronger competition for a limited supply of rental stock, and they also have less capacity to cope with rising rents that look likely to keep going up due to the entrenched undersupply.

The 2024 ANZ CoreLogic Housing Affordability Report notes that weekly rents have been rising strongly since the pandemic and are currently re-accelerating. “Nationally, annual rent growth has lifted from a recent low of 8.1 percent year-on-year in October 2023, to 8.6 percent year-on-year in March 2024,” according to the report. “The re-acceleration was particularly evident in house rents, where annual growth bottomed out at 6.8 percent in the year to September, and rose to 8.4 percent in the year to March 2024.”

Rents are also rising in markets that have experienced recent declines. “In Hobart, rent values saw a downturn of -6 percent between March and October 2023. Since bottoming out in October, rents have now moved 5 percent higher to the end of March, and are just 1 percent off the record highs in March 2023. The Canberra rental market was the only other capital city to see a decline in rents in recent years, where rent values fell -3.8 percent between June 2022 and September 2023. Since then, Canberra rents have risen 3.5 percent, and are 1 percent from the record high.”

The Productivity Commission’s review of the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement points out that high-income earners also have more capacity to relocate to cheaper markets when rents rise, which creates more competition for lower-income households competing for homes in those same areas.

ANZ CoreLogic notes that rents in lower-cost markets have risen the most in recent years, so much so that the portion of earnings that lower-income households have to dedicate to rent has reached a record high 54.3 percent. For middle-income households, it’s 32.2 percent and for high-income households, it’s just 22.9 percent. ‘Housing stress’ has long been defined as requiring more than 30 percent of income to put a roof over your head.

While some high-income households may aspire to own their own homes, rising property values have made that a difficult and long process given the years it takes to save a deposit. ANZ CoreLogic data shows it now takes a median 10.1 years in the capital cities and 9.9 years in regional areas to save a 20 percent deposit to buy a property.

It also takes 48.3 percent of income in the cities and 47.1 percent in the regions to cover mortgage repayments at today’s home loan interest rates, which is far greater than the portion of income required to service rents at a median 30.4 percent in cities and 33.3 percent in the regions.

Does Smart Home Tech Make You A Better Short-Term Rental Host?

How to ensure you don’t cross the line from surveillance to spying.

This may be contributing to continually rising weekly rents