Sce Pike is the CEO and Founder of IOTAS, a Smart Property Tech company that provides a complete turn-key IoT solution to the Multi-Family-Home (MFH) Industry that helps to increase value by providing a simple, yet elegant Smart Home experience to residents while reducing costs to building owners. Sce's, pronounced "say", background has always been centered around smart technology, beginning in Silicon Valley in 2000 when she joined Palm. Later, in 2007, she co-founded Citizen, which sold to Ernst and Young, which focused on Internet of Things (IoT) products such as Connected Cars, Connected Health, and Smart Home. While developing Smart Home products for Single-Family Home, she realized that the early adopters of technology were more likely to be renters and that there was a an opportunity to put Smart Devices into the fabric of the building and have it move-in ready. In 2015, Sce Pike and Jeremy Steinhauer launched IOTAS and since then they are now deployed in 40 metro areas in the us in over 60 buildings with nearly 100,000 IoT devices.

Our team at CREtech recently caught up with Pike to learn more about her site, strategy and vision.

CREtech: What does IOTAS do?

Sce Pike: IOTAS offers three different applications, one for residents, one for property managers, and one for IoT installers.

For residents, IOTAS provides the most comprehensive and rich experience because we outfit the entire apartment with sensors and approximately 14-20 devices such as door locks, open/close sensors, light switches, outlets and thermostats. This gives the residents a truly autonomous home where the intelligence is ambient throughout and simply just works at move-in. They can control their home with an app, voice, or through automations.

For property managers, they have the ability to automate the entire building with features that reduce their workload, such as "Make my building seem occupied" which automates the turning on and off of lights in vacant units during lease up, so they don't have to run around doing it and wasting time and energy.

For installers, (such as electricians, the on-site maintenance team or the IOTAS team,) we have the IOTAS Pro app which takes the process of setting up IoT devices which can typically takes 2-3 hours down to less than 10 minutes.

CREtech: What problems are you solving for commercial real estate professionals?

SP: While our current platform is primarily geared toward residential units for residents and property management & ownership teams, and their investors, our long-term goals extend well beyond that. We are currently working to provide the same benefits that we are providing to the MFH industry to utility companies, hotels, college campuses, healthcare centers and so forth.

CREtech: What is the latest news?

SP: IOTAS is never satisfied with the status quo of our own business strategy or industry norms. We, instead, push to stretch and evolve with the ever-changing world of IoT. Our recent partnerships with both Intel Energy Collective Optimization Software Platform and Mobile Doorman reflect that.

In order for our residents to have the most seamless living experience, we partnered with Mobile Doorman, a company that provides a white-label, comprehensive resident app that allows tenants to control all aspects of their living experience. IOTAS will fill the missing smart home component of that seamless experience.

In order to broaden our impact, we have also partnered with Intel’s Energy Collective Optimization Software Platform. The National Apartment association conducted a survey and found that the average utility expense per vacant unit was $330 per year for a garden style community and $500 per year for a mid to high rise property. We will provide property energy usage data to Intel Energy Collective Optimization. By utilizing this information, properties and residents can better monitor their energy usage and save money. As this becomes more widespread, this also have a large impact on lessening the burden on power grids.

We are looking forward to more partnerships that we are planning to announce through 2019!

CREtech: What are your views on the current real estate tech sector?

SP: The real estate tech sector has a huge opportunity right now to define their own digital future. By digitizing these buildings with sensors and IoT devices there is an opportunity to see exponential revenue per square foot.

Take for example, the phone industry, prior to iPhone, the value of a cellphone was seen solely as the hardware, i,e., how small it was or how much memory it had. Now, the value of a smart phone is largely driven by the software and it is all your photos, media, maps, social apps, and games that makes it necessary to have your smart phone within arms reach.

Much like the shift of phones to smart phones, the real estate will go through a similar shift from dumb to smart and those real estate groups that are on top of this shift and lead the charge to innovate will be the victors. Does anyone remember Nokia, Motorola, Blackberry, Palm? These were behemoths of their time but they couldn't innovate and they left room for Apple, Google, Samsung, HTC to takeover and the takeover was swift and immense. Similarly,

CREtech: What are your future plans?

SP: IOTAS believes that the future of home will change drastically. The notion of "home" for residents will no longer be associated with the physical space and materials but will be about how the home behaves and reacts to the resident. The future IOTAS Home will know a resident's preferences and settings and when they move from space to space, the future IOTAS Home will follow them and welcome them every time by changing the temperature to their preferred setting, dimming the lights to their preferred setting, turning on the TV or playing music, closing or opening blinds, changing the color of the lights and even giving off a preferred scent. This will all be done automatically and will also account for other things that may be impacting the mood of the residents. The future IOTAS Home is an ally that follows you from home to work, to cars, to hotels, to schoolrooms, and makes sure you're taken care of in any physical space.

 

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