If a builder or architect has handed you a $100,000 smart home line item, you have a question. Is that reasonable, or am I being taken?
The honest answer is that $100,000 is not a smart home. It is the foundation a smart home sits on. The automation that ties everything together comes on top of that.
This is what we mean.
Who this is for
Premium homeowners and builders mid-design. You are not asking should we have a smart home, you are asking what does competent look like at this price. You want a clear-eyed read of where the money goes, what it actually does, and why two integrators can quote the same number and deliver wildly different houses.
You are not the audience if your brief is "make all the lights work from my phone." That is a different conversation and a different price.
The order matters
A smart home is built in layers. You cannot put automation on top of nothing.
The base systems come first. Networking, cameras, intercom, access, and alarm. Without those in place, the automation layer has nothing to integrate. Most homeowners discover this the wrong way around. They get sold an automation system, then watch it slowly fail because the network underneath it cannot carry the load.
Build the floor before you build the ceiling.
Layer one: the core foundation (around $100,000)
This is the work that has to happen before automation can mean anything. Four core systems, in this rough order of priority.
Networking. $15–40K.
The single most important system in the house. A proper enterprise network is the difference between a smart home that works and one that does not.
Good routing. Good switching. Wi-Fi that covers the property properly with no dead zones. A real firewall that protects your data. Internal troubleshooting that detects and isolates problematic devices before they crash the network. The whole stack designed to last ten years without intervention.
A consumer router from your NBN provider cannot do any of this. Run a $4M smart home off one and you will spend the next decade rebooting it.
Cameras, intercom, and access. $15–30K.
Treat these as one integrated system, not three disconnected products. UniFi Protect cameras with local storage. UniFi Access on the front gate, front door, mudroom, and garage. A UniFi intercom that actually talks to the rest of the platform. No subscription. No overseas cloud uploads of your front door.
Alarm. $5–15K.
The Inception panel by Inner Range is our default. Australian made, locally serviceable, no overseas cloud dependency. Integrates cleanly with the rest of the system rather than sitting in its own silo.
Core foundation subtotal
Networking. Cameras. Intercom and access. Alarm. Those four systems land at around $100,000 done properly. They are the floor every other layer sits on.
That is what $100K of "smart home" actually buys you. Real systems, professionally installed, ready to be tied together.
What it does not buy you is a smart home. Not yet.
Layer two: audio and cinema (optional, scoped to brief)
Most premium homes specify some kind of audio package on top of the core foundation. The shape of it varies enormously, which is why these sit outside the core $100K rather than inside it.
Audio. Scoped to how you live.
Music in the bedrooms when you wake up. Music in the kitchen when you cook. A proper film-watching setup in the main living area. The same music playing across the back garden at a dinner party. The audio brief shapes the cost more than almost any other layer.
A simple living room setup is one number. Audio that follows you through every room of the house is a different number entirely.
This is a conversation, not a price tag. Think about what you actually want to hear, where you want to hear it, and how often. The system gets scoped around the answer.
Home cinema. From $50,000.
A separate conversation again. A real Atmos cinema room starts at $50K and climbs into the hundreds of thousands depending on display, processing, acoustic treatment, and seating.
Optional. Plenty of premium homes do not have a dedicated cinema room at all.
Layer three: the automation core ($30–50K)
This is the layer that turns four separate foundation systems and your audio into one.
Apple Home as the front-end platform. Home Assistant as the local engine. A real programming budget that decides how every room behaves and how every scene fires. A KNX gateway when there is lighting integration coming. A serious processor in a serious rack.
This is where the integrator earns their fee. Anyone can install gear. The difference is in the design of the logic and the programming time invested before you move in.
On a recent uncompromised Albert Park proposal, the Apple Home Control System layer alone came in at $38,000. Hardware plus the programming time to make it behave as a platform rather than a hobby.
What these numbers do and do not include
This is the part where most quote comparisons go wrong.
The figures throughout this post are for the control and automation equipment we supply and install. They are not for the things that equipment controls.
The KNX lighting layer covers the switches, the relays, the dimming channels, the gateway, and the programming. It does not cover the downlights, the pendants, the architectural fittings, or the sub-circuit cabling out to every fitting. That is the site electrician's scope.
The blinds layer covers the KNX relays that drive the motors. It does not cover the blinds themselves. Those come from the blind supplier.
The pool and spa control covers the integration. It does not cover the pool equipment.
The audio layer covers the amplifiers, the matrices, and the speakers we install. It does not cover the TVs. Clients buy those directly and the warranty stays with the manufacturer.
We happily do both the automation and the electrical work. In practice, most builders prefer to use their own electricians for the rough-in and sub-circuit cabling, so we usually slot in alongside them and look after the data, AV, TV, and automation side of the job. If the client would rather we do the whole lot, we can. We are licensed electricians too.
Either model works. The pricing in this post sits on top of whichever electrical scope you have already budgeted.
Layer four: the control layers (the automation that actually moves things)
This is where premium homes pull away from average ones.
Lighting and blinds. $100–150K.
The KNX system. Dozens of automation switches across the floor plate, relay blocks, dimming channels, the DALI gateway that handles the lighting protocol, the backbone that ties it together, and the blind motors and channels to drive every blind in the house.
On a recent uncompromised Albert Park proposal, this layer alone came in at $128,000. And that is just the equipment in the board. It does not include the sub-circuit cabling the site electrician runs to every fitting.
HVAC integration. Around $10K.
Bringing heating, cooling, and ventilation under the same control surface as lighting and audio.
Pool, spa, and outdoor zones. $5–15K each.
Specified on most premium builds. Plenty of homes have at least one pool, spa, or outdoor zone that wants to sit on the same control surface as the rest of the home.
The real total on a real recent home
A premium build with no corners cut, the kind we would rinse and repeat, lands around $300,000.
A recent Albert Park proposal of ours came in at $333,000 for the full uncompromised scope. Networking, cameras, intercom, access, alarm, an audio package across the home, a $55K home cinema, the automation core, the KNX lighting and blind control layer, and the security panel.
That is what a proper full-stack smart home costs in Melbourne in 2026.
When the builder pushes back
That same Albert Park proposal was pushed back from $330,000 to $265,000 to land near competing quotes.
What got removed is what most homeowners never see in a comparison spreadsheet. We did not strip out the programming hours. We did not cheapen the brain. We took out WiFi access points, data points, a portion of the motion sensors, several keypads, automated blinds, and the UPS and backup systems that keep everything alive in a power event.
The result is still a serious system. It is also a smaller, less resilient one. That is the trade. You only see it in five years when something blacks out and the rest of the house does too.
If you compare a $100K quote against a $330K version of the same scope, ask which lines disappeared. The honest answer separates the integrators.
When $300K is the wrong number
Under-spec. A 600-square-metre new build with lighting control, blinds, multi-zone audio, a home cinema and full HVAC integration is not a $100K job. It is a $250K to $400K job done properly. If someone is quoting half that for that scope, they are leaving something out, and you will find out which thing at handover.
Over-spec. A modest renovation with a few smart switches, a doorbell, and some networking does not need $300K. $40–80K is enough.
The danger zone is the middle. A brief that wants lighting and security and audio and cameras and HVAC integration, all shoehorned into a $100K number. That is where you end up with an extremely unreliable system, because no single layer was funded properly.
The difference between a smart home and expensive light switches
This is the part to read twice.
Not all integrators are the same. Yes, they have the licence. Yes, they can install the bits. The real art is in the initial design and the after-service care.
Is the system designed to be self-healing and reliable? Does it have battery backup? Has long-term integration been thought through? Or is it a wall of features that all happen to be in the same house, none of them really talking to each other?
Are you paying for an automation system that senses and manoeuvres around you, or are you paying for a bunch of expensive light switches that sit on the wall?
A lot of these homes are the second thing. Beautiful keypads, no actual programming. The lights turn on when you push them. They do not turn on when you walk in. They do not turn off when the room empties. They do not dim when the sun hits the western windows. They are not a smart home. They are a home with fancy switches.
The difference between the cheap guy and the proper guy is the programming budget. The cheap guy smacks switches on the wall and calls it done. The proper integrator allocates a serious programming budget, knows there will be return visits to refine scenes, and writes those return visits into the proposal upfront.
You want a smart home, not a home with fancy light switches.
If that distinction matters to you, we should talk early in your build.
If you want to understand the platform that sits underneath all of this, read Apple Home as a serious platform and our field guide on KNX in Melbourne residential builds.
Tags
