Selling house with HE hub and devices

I am selling up my home, and including with the sale my HE hub and all devices. The hub is registered against my personal email account. I would like to deregister the hub from my email account and allow the new home owner to register the hub against their email account, but without loosing all the settings. Could someone please advise if this is possible, and outline the steps involved. Many thanks in advance to anyone who can provide such advice.

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Don’t believe so. The factory reset, which de-registers the hub, wipes it for security reasons. I know this to be the case because a week or two ago, I de-registered my spare C-7 and sent it to a community member who was having Z-Wave difficulties.

What I have done is to register the hub and all integrations, etc., to the house, which has its own email address just for home automation things. I’ve also got a folder with all settings, IP addresses, passwords for each automation (of course, different passwords for each) printed out.

That way, when/if we sell the house or when I die, the next owner gets that folder and can change passwords as they wish, with no access to my or my wife’s personal emails. My wife insists that she is leaving the house when I die because she won’t be able to maintain the smart home stuff.

And welcome to the community.

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Many thanks for your prompt reply. I feared that may be the case, but was hoping that maybe the database could be backed up from one account and then restored to another. Do you know if that is possible? Similarly, exporting and importing the rules between accounts?

Like you, I'm not sure whether my wife, in the event of my demise, would have been happy trying to get together with the home automation stuff. But I do have a son locally sufficiently capable to have assisted her!

I don't think mere mortals like us can do this, but I bet support can update things. Did you submit a trouble ticket by sending an email to support@hubitat.com outlining what you want to do?

I think having a new/clean Gmail account ready for support to change to (provided they actually can do the email swap) would be the easiest way to handle this, but I suppose you could try waiting until the house is sold and change it to the new owner's emails at that time.

I would make it easy if you do create a new email and do something like 1313_Mockingbird_Lane@gmail.c0m or some variant of your address so it doesn't sound too personal. Then you just hand over all the login credentials at the time of closing. This way you could even leave other devices you intend to leave with the home (Alexa?) on that same email.

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My gut feel is that this will not play out the way that you hope, for two very specific reasons. First, HE will be attractive to only a subset of a subset of a subset of prospective buyers. Second, any self-respecting HE convert would be tortured to have their new house behaving per someone else's preferences.

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One of the most requested support ticket is replacing the admin when new owners take over, by either the new owners or the old. It seems like most new owners want the house fully functional so they don't have to start over from scratch.

With that being said, it is on our radar to allow admins to transfer or replace the main email address. For now, we ask that a Hubitat account be created for the new email, then submit a ticket to support@hubitat.com and we will take care of the transfer.

@pete.hodd if you didn't do so already, please create an account by going to this page:

https://my.hubitat.com/register

Once the account is created, send an email to support@hubitat.com.

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Thanks, sound advice which I will follow......

Thanks for your advice, much appreciated. Regarding the second point, I will be leaving my first attempt at HE implementation, after only a year or so. So a second attempt in a 'clean' setting will give me the opportunity to learn from my past mistakes :slight_smile:

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We sold a house (~1300 sq ft, two-story, half a duplex) last year that was my first HE house. Here is the s what I did to balance the perceived benefit to potential buyers.

• I pared things down a bit.
- door lock
- thermostat
- ceiling fan
- automated staircase night lighting
- strip led under wall cap
- curtain motion sensors at top and bottom
- smart outlet in garden
- other select lighting/switches
- fire tablet with HE dashboards enhanced with Smartly
- Ring doorbell not connect to HE
- Ring cameras not connected to HE
- I reset my hub and established a unique email for the hub to be assigned to. I also used this email for the other devices (Ring, thermostat, etc.)
- I created a basic information document about the home automation system. It included a basic intro to home automation, a list of devices, account information, and important URLs.

The automation devices did help to increase the sale price. I think the automation things that had the most impact were the tablet, door lock, video doorbell, and exterior cameras.

I believe @Hatallica is correct,

I also believe my real estate agent was very instrumental in selling the value of the automation devices to the buyer’s agent. Automation in and of itself will not sell your house. It will often be like a pool; very positive or very negative depending on the potential buyer.

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