According to a recent study by real estate website Zillow, home values have recently been rising at an 7.7% clip in the United States. While real estate values do not grow in a straight line, home ownership has often been viewed as an investment that builds value over time, with the added benefit of having a place to live tailored to your lifestyle.

Over 50% of homeowners plan to spend money on home improvement projects, which are great ways to customize your space to your lifestyle and aesthetic taste, and also increase a property’s resale value. Beyond bathroom and kitchen makeovers, wall and floor finishes and other popular improvements, smart home technology should also be a top consideration.

Why? A recent Houzz survey found that nearly half of renovating homeowners are adding smart systems to their homes, indicating very high interest in smart technology as an important feature desired in a new dwelling. 

With these current trends, read on to find out how Control4 Smart Home technology can not only enhance your lifestyle in Vancouver, WA, but it can also add to your home’s resale value. 

Smart home control technology keeps moving forward rapidly, and sometimes it’s hard to keep up with it. What's driving this rapid change? The same advances that have inspired so much innovation in our mobile devices — inexpensive, powerful processors, cloud-based software applications and artificial intelligence — are bringing more intelligence to home functionality than ever before.

With the huge CES consumer technology show in January, we are bound to see more new innovative devices and systems for home control and automation that everyone will be talking about for the next few months. We can expect to see more intelligent coffee makers, refrigerators, sprinkler controllers, and washing machines — as well as many other devices that may leave you scratching your head. More importantly, though, many of this year's advances will come with devices and technology that are already available, but their functionality and ease of use will get so much better that we will ultimately depend on them as much as our smartphones and computers. If smart home control and automation weren't already mainstream, we think that 2019 is the year that it becomes so.

At the start of the new year, we’re going to highlight the smart home control developments you’re likely to see in 2019. As you plan your projects for 2019 in Lake Oswego, keep an eye out for these — your clients will likely be asking you about building them into their homes.

You have amassed quite a CD collection over the years. Unfortunately, those 500 CDs do take up a bit of space. And finding the one you want is sometimes a challenge unless you have them all exquisitely organized. While you enjoy the full uncompressed sound quality of CDs, you will admit that the convenience of calling up almost any track on Spotify or Apple Music and streaming it to a wireless speaker is just easier — even if it’s not the last word in audio quality.

Perhaps you are wondering if there is a way to have the convenience of streaming and digital files along with the pleasure of playing that live concert or jazz CD that is difficult to find on Spotify. And you are picky about audio quality, not wanting to sacrifice the aural experience for convenience.

Well, you are in luck. There are such products that combine the convenience of digital sources with superb sound quality. One such product comes from Marantz, a storied audio brand that is perhaps best known these days for their exemplary AV receivers, which we recommend for home theater installations. But Marantz has also continued to make audiophile-grade two-channel stereo components, from affordable lines to the Reference line that competes with the best in high-end audio.

One of Marantz’s best all-around products is the ND8006 music player. If you need a complete digital upgrade to your two-channel audio rig in Portland, this unit does it all. Read on to learn more.

Professional photographers obsess about optimizing the lighting in their pictures. If a photo shoot is outdoors in natural light, the amount, the shadows, and the exposure are all critical to getting great shots. Indoors, photographers use different types of flashes, or they use specific lighting for posed pictures. 

Think of your home as a photo shoot.  With the right lighting, you can set just the ambiance you want—for cooking, eating, relaxing, entertaining, sleeping or any other endeavor. But beyond making it bright or dark enough for an activity, the right lighting can highlight the aesthetic appeal of your living space. 

What’s the best way to do that?  A Control4 lighting system can set just the right scene, deftly blending light and shadow just like a professional photographer. Read on for ways to make your home look like a perfect lit composition, day or night.