If you search this question you will find a confident number waiting for you: smart-home technology adds three to five percent to your sale price. It appears in article after article. We do not use it, and neither should you.
Trace that figure back and it does not lead to a housing economist or a survey of sales. It leads to vendor press releases. We went looking for the primary research when we built our Smart Home Dividend brief, and that number is not in it.
What is in the independent record is more useful, if less dramatic. Here is the whole of it.
Finding one: demand is mainstream, not niche
The National Association of Home Builders runs What Home Buyers Really Want, one of the more rigorous recurring surveys of buyer preference in the United States. In the 2024 edition, 78% of buyers rated a programmable thermostat essential or desirable — the highest-rated technology feature in the study. Security cameras came in at 76%, up thirty-six percentage points in a decade. Video doorbells reached 74%, wireless security systems 70%.
Sixteen of the nineteen home-technology features tested were rated essential or desirable by a majority. That is not an enthusiast segment. That is the market.
Adoption is tracking demand. Harbor Research's 2025 survey for the Association for Smarter Homes & Buildings, covering 611 households in the US and Canada, found smart-home adoption rose from 49% to 59% in a single year, with safety and security the leading interest area.
Finding two: equipped listings sell faster, and this is measured
Zillow's economists do something more valuable than asking people what they want — they analyse what actually happened. Against roughly two million sales in their 2023 analysis, listings that touted programmable thermostats, smart sprinklers, or smart lights sold up to six days sooner than expected. Homes with a doorbell camera sold up to five days faster, and a doorbell camera is among the cheapest items in the entire study.
Agents see the same thing from the other side. In Coldwell Banker's survey of 513 agents, 33% said smart-equipped homes sell faster and 64% reported buyer interest clearly rising.
Days on market is not a soft metric. A listing that moves the better part of a week faster carries less price-reduction risk, less carrying cost, and materially more leverage when an offer comes in. That is where the money is — it just does not arrive labelled as a price premium.
Finding three: the price effect is real but indirect
Here is the part most articles skip. Appraisers do not reliably credit smart-home equipment as a line item. If you are hoping the appraisal comes back higher because you installed good hardware, it very likely will not.
What Zillow's 2022 keyword work across 3.1 million sales did find is that homes touting features buyers are actively hunting for commanded premiums of up to 3.7%. Note the mechanism carefully: the premium attaches to features buyers are searching for, highlighted in the listing, not to the presence of equipment in a wall.
So the honest formulation is this. Smart capability widens your buyer pool, differentiates the listing, and shortens time on market. Those three effects show up in your net proceeds. None of them show up on the appraisal.
What this means if you are selling
The practical conclusion is a cost-ratio argument, not a premium argument.
Nobody should install a forty-thousand-dollar kitchen chasing a technology premium; that maths does not work and never did. But an intelligent home layer costs a fraction of a single price reduction. Set against staging, against a fresh coat of paint, against the first $10,000 you knock off the asking price in week six, it is one of the cheapest differentiators available — and unlike staging, the buyer keeps it.
The related point, which sellers routinely miss: a house that can be honestly described as an intelligent home is searchable. “Smart home” is a term buyers filter on. Being findable is worth something before anyone walks through the door.
The caveat we will keep repeating
We publish the limits of this evidence deliberately, because a listing agent who repeats the three-to-five-percent claim to a seller and is asked for the source has a bad afternoon ahead of them. The defensible case is strong enough without it. Use the real numbers.
The full brief, with every figure traced to its primary source, is at The Smart Home Dividend, and there is a PDF if you would rather hand it to a client. Agents who want to work with us on this can register as a referral partner — a flat $1,000 per household placed, no tiers and no tracking codes.
- National Association of Home Builders, What Home Buyers Really Want, 2024 edition.
- Harbor Research for the Association for Smarter Homes & Buildings, 2025 survey (n=611, US and Canada).
- Zillow, analysis of approximately 2 million home sales, 2023; keyword premium analysis across 3.1 million sales, 2022.
- Coldwell Banker, survey of 513 real estate agents; Coldwell Banker & CNET Smart Home Marketplace Survey.