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Amazon Experience Centers are now open in Lennar model homes in Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC with more coming soon. Customers can visit amazon.com/experience for more information and to find available homes to tour. Learn more about the Amazon Experience Centers in this new TechCrunch article by Ingrid Lunden.
Last week, we reported on how Amazon was leveraging a new relationship with home builder Lennar to expand its smart home business, specifically in the sale of home security services. Today, Amazon is taking the next step forward in that strategy: it’s launching a new chain of showrooms it’s calling the Amazon Experience Centers across Lennar model homes to demo and help sell its smart home devices, Amazon Dash Buttons, and other consumer electronics services such as streaming Prime Content with Fire TV.
The model homes will be fully connected up as Alexa-enabled smart homes, Amazon says, with customers able to walk through and see the full effect of being able to use Alexa to control all electronic and connected kit, from TVs and lights to thermostat and window blinds.
These Experience Centers will also become places where people can go to arrange for and order home services through Amazon Home Services, the company’s Thumbtack-style marketplace that lets people search for and book a range of in-home contractors for cleaning, fixing or helping in other ways.
The centers will open first in 15 model homes in the cities of Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC, and Amazon will be looking to strike deals with other home builders to replicate the model.
The Experience Centers, and the other work that Amazon is doing to provide a more in-person angle to its smart home strategy specifically is particularly important to the company’s smart home and consumer electronics strategy. If people are buying products to put into their homes, and many of those products represent the next generation of consumer electronics, it’s important for Amazon to provide more real-world touchpoints both to better sell and explain the services, and to help make consumers — the majority of whom will not be early adopters — more comfortable with the purchases.
Read the full article on TechCrunch
Lennar and Amazon have teamed up and recently announced the opening of interactive Amazon Experience Centers within select Lennar model homes across the United States, including the Tovero Community. Now customers in the area can experience first-hand the convenience of Alexa smart home experience and more in a real home environment. Learn more about Lennar’s connected homes and the future of smart home technology in this recent The Mercury News article by Rex Crum.
VALLEJO — From the outside, homebuilder Lennar’s model home in Vallejo could be any other house in a new suburban development. But that’s where the similarities end and the future begins, courtesy of a new smart-home partnership with Amazon.
This week, Amazon and Lennar began showing off what they are calling the Amazon Experience Center, a pre-wired, voice-activated smart home at a North Bay Lennar housing development, along with similar model homes in seven other locations across the country.
Lennar — one of the nation’s largest homebuilders — plans to build Amazon’s Alexa voice-assistant technology into the design when constructing all of its houses nationwide from now on. Because of the partnership with Amazon, this technology package will come standard and will not add anything to the base cost of the home. Alexa will be able to handle many of the mundane, everyday tasks that those who buy the developer’s homes currently do on their own.
Talk to Alexa and, thanks to the Amazon Echo devices that are standard with the house, you can close your shades, find a movie to watch via Amazon Prime — and the Amazon Fire TV that comes with the home — schedule automatic orders of household goods, or order those things directly by using the Amazon Dash buttons that also come standard with the home. Finally, you can lock your doors and set your thermostat as you turn in for the night.
Technology that handles such chores isn’t new; Amazon, Google and Apple have offered voice-command assistant technology for years. But a home built from the ground up with a full suite of one company’s home-control technology takes the concept to another level. And while Alexa — or any other kind of voice-command platform — offers convenience, the Lennar-Amazon connected-home model presents a slate of questions about just how much control one company can and should have over an individual’s daily routines, habits and privacy.
“This definitely takes the ‘everything store’ to another level, delivering not just products, but nearly every service one could need in a given day,” said Gene Munster, partner with tech research firm Loup Ventures. “A wholesale upgrade to a fully smart home gives Amazon a lot of power over whoever lives there. Each incremental smart device you control with Alexa is another touch point for the Amazon brand and makes Prime a little more difficult to leave.”
During a tour of the Amazon Experience Center home in Vallejo, Tom Burrill, Lennar’s Bay Area division president, said that for some, facing such new technologies in the home “can be intimidating,” but that seeing the devices in a home setting can alleviate worries about how everything works together.
Continue reading the full article HERE.
If you’ve been in your Lennar home a while now, the clutter may have begun to accumulate and feel overwhelming. But believe it or not, it’s still possible to get your home back in shape, just the way that you bought it.
With these 3 easy tips, your home will look brand new in no time!
One way to de-clutter your home while also doing a good deed is to go through your items and see what can be donated. Items like clothing, gadgets and decorations can easily accumulate over the years and sometimes may be used only a few times before just taking up valuable space. Instead of throwing those items away, find a local non-profit organization that collect donations for a good cause.
You can also recycle certain items made of paper or plastic.
With either option, you can decrease the clutter of your home, reduce the stress it brings and know you’ve helped give back to the greater good.
Maybe you have more than just a few items that need to be sorted. Maybe there are several rooms in your home that need some work. No worries, just take a deep breath and create a schedule.
It might not be realistic for you to declutter your entire home in one day. However, how about decluttering one space at a time?
Figure out what works for your lifestyle and your schedule and coordinate accordingly. Start with the areas where you spend the most time and which are frequented the most by guests, i.e. the living room, kitchen, foyer, staircase, etc. After you’ve organized the main areas, prioritize, one by one, the bedrooms, bathrooms and other areas needing a refresher.
Whether we realize it or not, we are exposed to enormous amounts of marketing and solicitation on any given day. Be it a radio ad, television commercial, magazine cover or the logo on someone’s shirt, we are constantly marketed to. Sometimes the things that we are exposed to subconsciously influence us to buy on impulse.
How many items do you have lying around your house that you’ve only used once or twice? Getting out of this habit can simultaneously save money while also saving space in your home.
When shopping, make a list of the items that you know you are looking for and are prepared to buy. When you are distracted by something that is not on that list, think about its purpose and consider if it is a true necessity or a want. Instead of buying it at that moment, get the things on your list first and go home to think about the extra items you wanted to buy. More than likely, by the time you go back to that store, the item will have left your mind or lost at least some of its appeal.
Your Lennar home should be a safe haven and a retreat. Leave the stresses of the day outside and use s
ome of these simple steps to remove clutter from your house and ultimately, your mind.
Fresno, Calif. – May 2018 – Lennar is excited to announce the Grand Opening event for the desirable Chateau Series of new home designs at the Carriage House community will be on Saturday, June 2. Prospective homeshoppers are invited to attend to tour three new beautifully-decorated model homes.
“We are so thrilled about this upcoming Grand Opening where homeshoppers can experience our new home designs, incredible Everything’s Included® features and explore this great community,” said Susan Wilke, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Lennar Central Valley. “We’ve brought some of our most popular floorplans here that showcase family-focused layouts and our new home automation products and technology.”
The Chateau Series offers homeshoppers five distinctive floorplans to choose from in both single and two-story designs. These homes range in size from approximately 1,766 to 3,167 square feet and provide three to five bedrooms and two to four bathrooms. Included in the series is the Camelot Next Gen® The Home Within A Home® design for multigenerational living. This unique home features a private suite with its own separate entrance, living room, bedroom, bathroom and kitchenette.
Lennar is the first builder to offer Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ Home Designs. These new homes incorporate mapped out and built in wireless access points throughout the home that later provide uninterrupted internet coverage throughout every room in the home. Lennar’s signature Everything’s Included® program now offers the latest in home automation products and technology from today’s most trusted brands, providing homebuyers with a connected and modern living experience.
The Grand Opening will take place at the Welcome Home Center located at 6837 E. Redlands Avenue in Fresno, just off Armstrong and Dakota. For more information visit www.lennar.com/fresno or call (559) 554-1147.
About Lennar
Lennar Corporation, founded in 1954, is one of the nation’s leading builders of quality homes for all generations. Lennar builds affordable, move-up and active adult homes primarily under the Lennar brand name. Lennar’s Financial Services segment provides mortgage financing, title insurance and closing services for both buyers of Lennar’s homes and others. Lennar’s Rialto segment is a vertically integrated asset management platform focused on investing throughout the commercial real estate capital structure. Lennar’s Multifamily segment is a nationwide developer of high-quality multifamily rental properties. Previous press releases and further information about Lennar may be obtained at the “Investor Relations” section of Lennar’s website, www.lennar.com.
The Connected Home by Lennar is the first Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ Home Design that keeps you connected to the most desirable technology brand devices, all of which are included with your new home at an outstanding value. Learn more about how Lennar and Amazon have teamed up in this recent USA Today article by Elizabeth Weise.
VALLEJO, Calif. — The nation’s largest home builder is betting voice-activated digital assistants and smart devices will become as expected in a new home as garages now are.
Lennar announced Wednesday that standard features in its new homes will include built-in Wi-Fi, smart locks, doorbells, thermostats and lights — all controlled by Alexa, Amazon’s voice-activated digital assistant.
Each house will come with two Alexa-enabled smart speakers, an Echo Show and an Echo Dot. New homeowners will also get a free visit from an Amazon technician to help set everything up and teach them how to use it.
“This will be the hallmark of why we buy a new home,” said David Kaiserman, president of Lennar Ventures. “It’s an important step in the mass adoption of all these technologies.”
No other major builder has folded this still-evolving technology into all its homes. The announcement marks a major play to get what is still something of a cool, but not vital, technology into a broad swath of American homes.
It comes as Amazon, Google and Apple fight for market share in the smart speaker category. In 2018, about 18% of Americans will use a smart speaker at least once a month, digital marketing firm eMarketer found. Amazon holds 66.6% of the market and Google 29.5%. And it’s a bet that homeowners will find the convenience of a ready-made smart home outweighs any misgivings they have about giving one tech company even more information about their daily habits.
To get the word out to home buyers, Lennar and Amazon on Wednesday will open eight model homes across the country featuring the built-in technology.
