I am selling my condo and am including my entire home automation solution running on my HE. Don't worry I will be repurchasing a new HE for my new residence. Is there an easy way for me to transfer ownership to the new homeowner without having to set up everything from scratch?
Congratulations! Please have the new owners create a Hubitat account for my.hubitat.com. Then once you have that in place, send us an email at support@hubitat.com along with the new owners' email address so we can further assist.
It’s too late for your case now, but I will tell you how I handle this, not only if/when our house is sold, but also when I die. All home automation accounts are registered to the home, which has its own email account, separate from our personal email accounts. Just give the new owner a printout of the file containing passwords for all of the automation accounts, DHCP lease reservations on the router, etc.
100% this is what I do and I really wish more smart home services support this kind of layout, looking at you Amazon. IMO the house owns the devices much more than people and it makes it a lot easier to manage and is much more transparent to all parties involved.
That's interesting that the new owner is taking over your home automation. My Frankenstein collection of home automation devices is getting uninstalled and coming with me because I can't imagine someone else would find value in my exact setup. If I had an all-Ring setup or similar, that would be different. However, mine relies on 3 Hubitat hubs, a Lutron Bridge, a RPi, etc so trying to sell my house with home automation devices left behind would probably be a detriment to the sale.
@672southmain & @ cjkeenan - that is a brilliant idea and that is exactly what I will do, i.e. migrate the HE to a house account and prep for the sale..
@stephen_nutt - I will be buying brand new kit for my new place including the new HE. The Home automation was a significant part of the sale..new owner wants to just move in and enjoy all of my work which is good for my ego lol..
Interesting. I would never do that, nor accept the accounts from someone anyway. Just like changing locks, the 1st thing I would do is wipe it clean, factory reset it and re-do it if there were HA stuff in a house I bought.
In fact... Last time I sold a house (3 years ago) the new home owners specifically made me replace all smart switches with dumb ones as part of the sales agreement. lol
2 houses ago the house I bought had a Control4 system I made the old owners completely rip out before taking ownership, too.
Well, clearly, the first thing the recipient should do is change all the passwords, but that’s their problem.
However, doing it this way doesn’t give the recipient access to my credit cards on my Amazon (Alexa) account, or any personal bank accounts that have automatic recurring charges, etc.
Either does taking the hub with you and factory resetting it on your way out the door. The "it's their problem" also applies to whatever HA equipment they inherit, right?
For this reason, though there are smart switches, almost everything operates without hubs (Lutron, Hubitat, etc) except closet light turn-on when doors open and trigger their contact sensors. However, there is still a manual switch (Lutron Caseta) in each closet that can manually turn on the light.
I believe that all I would have to do is to change the GE Smart Motion Switches/Dimmers from Manual mode (or not) if light operation by motion is desired.
If a buyer wants a dumb house, I’d just unplug the hubs. But I do have a box filled with all the switches that were replaced. No smart outlets.
I've done that before, too when I didn't want to keep the switches. Good or bad, I've bought and sold way too many houses, so have had quite a bit of experience in this area.
It is the people that disconnect the load, and put relays behind the switches that have to do some work.... Then the hub HAS to stay with the house, or regular switches put back in, as the lights won't work otherwise.
That reminds of when I sold my parents house after my dad passed away and my mom decided to sell and move to a nursing home. When we would get to my parents house, my daughter would press the button that would open the garage doors (unused button on the same remote that I use for my home).
So about a year after we sold the house, when passing in front of it on my way to a friends house, my daughter decided to press the button just for fun and to my surprise, the garage door opened. So I turned around to go explain (for the third time) to reset the garage door opener so that my remote stops working on there door, but I'm pretty sure they did not do it since they were kind of clueless even if I showed them in the original manual how to do it (again 3 times).
So the moral of the story, change everything when buying a new house!!!
I usually make an email for the house it's being installed in, like the one I'm signed in on which is the old hall, so I just then pass the logins over and tell them to make the hub ip static, so technically you could just make a new email address and login then add the details for support to swap over then You don't get any future drama lol I hope that is useful info !
I was able to create a "house" account as suggested in the thread then followed Bobby's instructions to forward the request to support. He was able to transfer the registration to the house account with zero fallout.
On a somewhat related note, how could I transfer ownership to my clients that I set up and get automated for them but want them (as do they) to control it after all initial setup done?