High-Tech Caretaker

TIP OF THE DAY

High-Tech Caretaker

By MAREK FUCHS

Published: January 9, 2004 in the New York Times

SNUG at home in Hamilton, Mass., Ralph W. Sevinor keeps a watchful eye out for possible floods or break-ins at his vacation house 1,500 miles away in Delray Beach, Fla. ? not to mention unwanted stacks of newspapers and U.P.S. men, who might drop off perishables when he is not in Florida to collect them.

To stay on top of a home that is three hours away by plane, Mr. Sevinor, 48, the owner of an alarm installation business, has cameras perched near doors and in basements, all linked to his Dell computer in Hamilton. When someone comes to the door, a photo is taken ? triggered by the pressing of the doorbell ? and immediately sent to him by e-mail. That's how he was notified about the overeager newspaper deliveryman who was piling newspapers on his doorstep, even though Mr. Sevinor wasn't scheduled to be in Florida for months. He called the distributor; problem solved.

Mr. Sevinor is just one of a growing number of people who are using technology to monitor and control their second homes from afar, replacing the traditional caretaker with a high-tech equivalent.

The hope is to make one aspect of second-home ownership a memory of the past: arriving with plans for a dry martini and a good book only to find that the basement has flooded. But the technology to monitor second homes is not just about avoiding watery basements or watching for burglars or phantoms. The same sensors allow you to tweak the temperature of a wine cellar miles away or to switch on the hot tub from your car as you begin your snail-like Friday-night commute. The sensors, cameras and two-way audio devices are often hooked into traditional alarm systems, and they run the gamut of pricing. They can operate over phone lines and broadband cable or by satellite.

Such product-line extensions have been a major source of security industry growth in recent years, said Richard Chase, the executive director of the Security Industry Association in Alexandria, Va. He said that there has been a constant stream of new products, and interest in them is growing. "Calls come in from venture capitalists almost every day, asking about the industry," he said.

Mr. Chase said that he did not have precise numbers for how many remote monitoring systems go into second homes but, as a gift, he recently set up his in-laws with OzVision (Mr. Sevinor uses it, too). OzVision, an Israeli company that opened an office in Massachusetts in 2002, offers closed-circuit-video and still-photo systems. (The images generated by these kinds of systems can be monitored by the homeowner or by a security company.)

Mr. Chase set cameras on the front and back doors and in the living room of his in-laws' second home in the Berkshires. "They can see if their son-in-law has his feet up on the coffee table," Mr. Chase said, "which I wouldn't dare do."

It's a long way from leaving a key under the front mat for the local handyman. Robert McCrie, a professor of security management at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, said that such technology is changing the face of second-home ownership. Feeling safer about everything from floods to burglary, homeowners are leaving more valuables in their homes and investing more money in them.

"That you are responsible for something so far away is a very funny thing to get used to," said Dr. Barbara Stimmel, a psychotherapist and former president of the New York Freudian Society ? and a Manhattan resident with three homes elsewhere. "It takes time to get into the right frame of mind about it." Time has helped Dr. Stimmel, but so have her sensors, which notify local oil companies directly when the temperature drops below a preset level at one of her second homes. A serviceman is sent out, and Dr. Stimmel doesn't hear about it until the problem has been solved.

Andrew Kalmanash, an accountant from Stamford, Conn., is concerned about the boiler in his second home and also about security and the welfare of his eight show-quality Portuguese water dogs. Though East Booth Bay, Me., is hardly a crime center, Mr. Kalmanash has several layers of security around his second home there, and he is contacted by telephone or cellphone when any layer is breached.

The smoke and fire detectors inside his house are even more important. Mr. Kalmanash, 46, and his wife, Angela, 48, take their dogs along when they go to East Booth Bay, leaving them in metal cages when they go out for dinner. If a smoke or a fire alarm is triggered, the Kalmanashes would be notified immediately by cellphone.

"The last thing I want to do is lose a critter I put a lot of training into," Mr. Kalmanash said. He said his monitoring system cost less than $4,000 to install and about $200 annually to run.

When Monette Klein-O'Grady, 49, built a second home in Miami recently, she had the ADT alarm system upgraded to allow her to control the air-conditioning from her home in North Carolina, allowing her to react to weather fronts hitting Florida. Her hope is that the system will save her money in the long run, but economics wasn't the only priority.

"I also drive the 13 hours to Miami," Mrs. Klein-O'Grady said, "and I program my exact E.T.A. to prepare my steam room to be ready. I like to arrive, steam and jump into bed."

A  BIG limitation to high-tech second homes is the lack of anything like a virtual caretaker who could take a spin through the house, find something the technology cannot spot and make a judgment call. "If a bird flies into a window," Dr. Stimmel said, "we still need someone to call the glazier and someone to let them in."

But Mr. Kalmanash said that the human element can come up short, too. "Even if you have someone check every 24 hours," he said, "it is incredible how quickly a series of events, like a furnace going out, can bring the house down."

If he gets a signal that something has gone wrong and the house needs to be checked, Mr. Kalmanash calls the alarm company and it turns off the various alarm triggers for a repairman. He does the same thing, incidentally, when he is at his vacation home and something goes wrong at his primary residence in Connecticut. His next-door neighbor there has a key but no alarm code. Mr. Kalmanash turns off the system from Maine when his neighbor needs to go inside.

A common criticism of monitoring systems is that they are only as good as the reliability of local electricity transmission, rarely a strong suit of remote vacation areas. Mr. Kalmanash, for one, has battery backups. "And some people have a generator big enough to start up a whole block," he said. "But I haven't gotten that insane yet." The only bother of the spasmodic local electricity flow, he added, is that he receives frequent notifications that the electricity is out.

Still, even high technology can go on the fritz. Dr. Alan Hilfer, a psychologist who lives in Manhattan, bought a house last year in Damascus, Pa. He said that it came with a sensor that was supposed to notify him when the cesspool overflowed. The sensor, unfortunately, broke. Dr. Hilfer is currently in the market for a monitoring system for his cesspool and water pipes that he hopes will be "less than something James Bond would have," but enough to keep the waste where it is and water flowing.

On the whole, technology is a timesaver, especially for a man who manages 825 vacation homes on the Outer Banks of North Carolina ? hurricane country. Using a Web- and telephone-based program, Timothy Cafferty, the president and general manager of ResortQuest Outer Banks can now warn thousands of people at once that a hurricane is coming, giving them 90 seconds of evacuation instructions over the telephone and requesting that they press a button to confirm that the message was received. His staff used to make individual phone calls until their fingers hurt, or they had to run around with a clipboards and bullhorns.

"Those were the bad old days," Mr. Cafferty said, with a shudder. "We used to have to say the same thing 4,800 times."

Monitoring technologies are also expanding into less traditional second homes, like boats. Michael Landsberg, sales manager for Monaco Marine Group USA, an importer of luxury yachts, said that his firm offered systems installed by Professional Security Monitoring of Nutley, N.J., on $700,000 to $2 million Vicem yachts. The alarms work over telephone lines in the marina and use cellular networks when the boat is out cruising.

While technology is changing the nature of second-home ownership, it is not entirely transforming it. Some second-home owners, like Dan Miller, who lives in Manhattan and has a farmhouse on the North Fork of Long Island, see wiring a second home as modernity taken to an illogical extreme. He started the process, but the day he was setting up an iPod, lightning hit the house, putting a hole in it and short-circuiting all the electronics. Mr. Miller took it as a signal to keep life in the country simple, meaning circuitry free.

But for those who do use the new technology, is there a break in insurance costs to be had, considering all the money they spend monitoring their second homes?

Kip Diggs, a spokesman for State Farm Insurance, said that for the near future the answer is no. Such technologies are too new to be reflected in claims statistics, so insurers are holding tight.

They do give discounts for simple fire and burglar alarms, but not for those that detect deluges in the basement. "If you are not going to be there for extended periods of time," Mr. Diggs said, "we generally recommend that you just shut off the main water valve."