New home builders are starting to equip residences with smart door locks, and for good reason. With these locks installed, homeowners enjoy even more security and convenience than ever before. Instead of digging out your keys, you can use an app, fingerprint scanner or voice commands to unlock and lock your door in an instant. Curious if this system would benefit you? Take a look at this guide to learn everything you need to know.
What are Smart Door Locks?
Smart door locks connect to WiFi to allow you to lock and unlock your home without a key in hand. You just have to use your fingerprint, voice or an app to tell the locking mechanism when to open and close. The app-connected models even let you make changes on the fly while you’re away from home.
So, if you forgot to lock up or are just worried you did, then you can activate the lock with a click of a button. Similarly, if you need to let someone in while you’re away, you can do that, too. You use smart locks on the doorknob, deadbolt or both, depending on the level of security you want for your home.
Smart Door Lock Benefits
Although using your key to lock and unlock your home is easy enough, smart systems take that experience to the next level and give you all the following benefits.
Boost Household Safety
Smart locks help improve the safety of your household by making it easy to get inside without fumbling with your keys. Beyond that, these systems make it easy to get back inside if you get locked out. With that, you never again have to worry about storing an extra key under your doormat or in a phony rock.
Make Life More Convenient
As you walk up to your door with your hands full, getting your house key out of your pocket proves difficult indeed. To avoid all that, you can just unlock the door from your phone before loading up your arms or reach out a finger to press on the reader. And if you have friends or family coming from out of town, you don’t have to arrange time off to go let them in. You can just click a few buttons once they arrive to open the door while you’re still at work.
Enjoy True Peace of Mind
If you have that nagging feeling that you left your front door unlocked, you’ll never again have to race home to check once you have smart locks on your side. You can just check the app to verify that they’re locked or click lock to secure the front door if your gut feeling was correct.
Save Money on Insurance
Homeowner’s insurance companies often offer discounts on your premium when you install security systems – and smart locks definitely qualify. Since these locks help prevent burglaries and other incidents, they may net you a discount of around 5% a month, if not more. You just have to let your insurance company know, and they will apply the discount to your account.
When you buy a home equipped with intelligent locking systems, all these benefits are yours for the taking.
Best Practices When Using Smart Locks
When setting up your smart locks, you’ll want to follow all the steps in the user manual to avoid missing any key information.
In addition, it’s important to:
- Make use of all the safety features
- Lock any smartphone that uses the app
- Watch the battery life of your locks
- Have a backup key on hand at all times
When you follow all these important practices, you can make the most of your smart lock setup and enjoy all the benefits it offers.
If your new home build only has these locks on the front door, you might want to add them to all the other exterior doors as well. Even the garage door can benefit from smart opening systems that improve your home security and make your life more convenient.
About the Author
Daniel Silva and Graciela Florez
Hi, we are the team of Daniel Silva and Graciela Florez and we'd love to assist you. Whether you're in the research phase at the beginning of your real estate search or you know exactly what you're looking for, you'll benefit from having a team of real estate professionals by your side. We'd be honored to put our real estate experience to work for you.