Once upon a time, subdivisions in Southern California communities like this one lured home buyers with promises of spacious garages, avocado-colored refrigerators with automatic ice-makers and such novel curiosities as dimmer switches and microwave ovens.
But that was back in the last century.
When Darren and Susan Murtha went hunting for their first home in a new planned community on the edge of Mission Viejo, they were confronted with a very 21st Century sales pitch: a house built for the digital era.
Each house in the new community — ultimately 8,100 are planned — will be cabled to make use of every possible product the information age offers, can conjure or devise, from smart appliances to a community intranet where you can book a baby-sitter or order prescriptions from the local pharmacy.
“This is the brains of it all,” said Darren Murtha as he moved aside the clothes in a closet to reveal a computer control box called a Home Director. Cables designed to control just about every aspect of the home snake into jacks and sockets.
Such devices have been, or will be, installed in every house in the Ladera Ranch community, providing residents with 200 channels of cable television, high-speed Internet access and digital phones. The fees are built into the homeowner association charges and basic high-speed Internet access is $23 a month.
As mega-mergers between cable and Internet companies and content providers continue, like that between America Online and Time Warner last month, high-capacity cabling in homes will become increasingly important.
“As content enriches from the digital point of view, the norm will be to have high-speed Internet access,” said Kimberly Toonen, vice president for new business at Cox Communication’s Orange County system.
Cox, the company that cabled Ladera Ranch, spent $18 million to bring in the hybrid fiber optical-coaxial cables that make it possible for homes here to take advantage of present and developing technology.
In the Chicago area, some builders have begun offering high-tech wiring options, but few are planning entire communities around extensive fiber optic systems and intranet connections.
Those who are say the technology can be an effective marketing tool in convincing buyers that their homes are designed for the future. “It’s coming and people are starting to realize that. Even the ones who don’t want it have kids that are nudging them in the ribs and saying, `You have to have fiber optics,’ ” said Allen Marrinson, co-developer of Grand Videre Estates, a 265-acre development in Janesville, Wis.
At Ladera Ranch, almost every aspect of the community, from your introduction to the facilities and amenities to the way you watch television and mind your baby, is controlled by signals passing over miles of expensive cable buried in ditches below the newly landscaped lawns and the just completed sidewalks.
When prospective buyers enter the community center — now serving as a sales office as well — they are introduced to a digital host on flat screen monitors.
“Teresa,” the digital saleswoman, will tell you all you need to know about how the high-tech community functions.
An elaborate intranet is at the heart of building “community” in the digital age here.
Each resident of Ladera Ranch can have his or her own home page on that net, known as LARCS, for Ladera Ranch Community Services, tailored to their own needs.
Kitchen computer screens have replaced all those magnets and paper scraps stuck to the refrigerator door.
A community bulletin board advertises services and publicizes community events. Recent postings: baby-sitting for $4 an hour, a bed for sale, and a plea for a community exercise group.
Want to notify all the members of the junior high soccer team that practice has been canceled? Just point and click.
Inside the homes, which range in price from $200,000 to $500,000, each room has some electronic wizardry.
In many houses, CD or DVD players in one room can be piped to every room. In one model, the Steve Martin film “Father of the Bride” was playing on a flat screen television on the bedroom wall. The screen was surrounded with a gilt frame.
When no movie is playing, the screen can be programmed to produce a variety of images, a kind of constantly evolving photograph. “You can program it for any mood,” said Toonen of Cox Communications. “It is great for parties.”
Infrared sensors can turn on televisions and lights when a person walks into a room. Cox and others are working on new technology for digital video recorders that will enable people to download programs from television broadcasts, store them digitally and then play them back at will. The house wiring links all computers in the house into a local area network, over which they share data and use a single printer. Tiny cameras monitor activity in many rooms. No need to stop watching television when the door bell rings; a click on the screen shows who is standing outside.
“If I am working in my home office and the kids are a little too quiet upstairs I can click and see what they are up to,” said Diane Gaynor, a publicist representing Ladera Ranch.
The 100-house Grand Videre Estates development in Janesville is being built with a fiber optic network to support high-speed Internet access, digital telephone service, video conferencing, and a planned community center. The houses will be built on 1 to 5.5-acre lots and priced from $250,000 to $650,000, including the lot. A personal computer is a standard item in every house.
Homeowners will be able to call into their homes from another location to activate lights, heating and cooling systems, exterior irrigation systems and other functions. “If they’re out of town and want to change the temperature in the house, they can raise or lower it with a voice command,” said co-developer Marrinson said.
Through a control panel, homeowners can link certain functions to pre-set words or instructions. “Say you’re in your bedroom at night and you hear a noise. All you have to do is say, `Emergency’ and all the lights in the house go on,” Marrinson said.
While the technology is a selling point, it is not the primary reason prospective buyers look at the development. They initially are drawn to the housing design, the setting among 65 acres of lakes, ravines and wooded terrain, and the fact that exterior maintenance will be handled by an association, Marrinson said.
The technology also adds to the development costs. “It cost us about $1 million to lay 3 miles of fiber optics in the streets,” Marrinson said. He estimates that the cost to configure the interior connections will be $10,000 to $15,000 per house because of the time and expertise needed for the work. The project is being developed by Grand Videre Enterprises, also based in Janesville.
Prospective buyers who understand technology are receptive to having it, but others have to be convinced of the long-term benefits. “If they don’t want it we try to talk them into it,” Marrinson said. “Not because we want to recover our costs, but because we think 10 years from now it will be a very strong selling point.”
The sales pitch has to be somewhat low-key, however, to avoid overwhelming the technically challenged. “We have to be careful not to overdo it because after a few minutes I can see their eyes glazing over, but when we explain to them that everyone will have it and they won’t have to retrofit to keep up with the neighbors, it clicks.”
Whether buyers will use all of the possible functions remains to be seen, but Marrinson said the focus is to plan for the future. “I think some people will use the very basic stuff — turning on the lights and being able to control the heating and air conditioning when away from home,” Marrinson said. “The ones who are into computers will go all the way with it.”
At Coffee Creek Center in Chesterton, Ind., technology is viewed as just one component used to create a sense of community, said Kevin Warren, director of marketing for the development. “We are looking at `How can technology be used to support a community,’ rather than lining up a lot of gee whiz features.”
Developer Lake Erie Land Co. is completing the infrastructure for the 640-acre, mixed-use project and plans to begin construction of 20 to 30 homes this year. The project is scheduled to include 2,000 homes including single-families, townhouses and apartments, with townhouses priced from $100,000 and single-family homes priced from $180,000 to $300,000.
Homeowners will be linked together through an intranet that allows them to access electronic mail, fax, voice mail and community and school information. They also will be able to order groceries electronically from a store located in the project’s retail area.
While technology is a selling point, the structural housing features and the way the neighborhoods are designed often are more important, Warren said. “There are a lot of people who want some degree of technology brought into the house, but given the choice between high-tech wiring and a nicer front porch and common areas, it still appears to me that people are choosing physical things over technology.”
At Ladera Ranch, all the bells and whistles presently operating in the new houses represent only the earliest applications of new technology for wired homes. Once the intranet is fully functional, residents will be able to check on their children’s school performance and get homework assignments. Lights, appliances, heating and air conditioning can all be adjusted over the network, even remotely from telephone key pads.
Such homes even hold out the possibility of turning on a home security system from the road, or starting the evening meal just as the airplane lands.
Using that same intranet, residents will be able to control appliances in their homes over the telephone. Someone who rushed out of the house to catch a plane, only to remember that they forgot to turn on the alarm system, could dial in from a cell phone, or even from the plane and activate the alarm. Running late from the office and nobody is home? You could use the same method to turn on the lights and, ultimately, even start dinner.
