Over the past few years, Nest has been one of the most popular smart home product brands, and now Google is starting to take control of the various products. But, as residential builders are apparently no longer using Nest products as a result, this could have a negative effect on sales.
Bloomberg notes that some U.S. residential builders have decided to stop purchasing Nest products due to recent and upcoming changes to the platform from Google. A core part of this seems to be how tightly Google connects Nest devices and Google accounts to Assistant.
Mark Zikra from CA Ventures explained that Nest products have been “stopped” by the property builder / management company. He says the company would have bought and installed hundreds of Nest devices at once before, but they think that it can no longer be done as the products have to be linked to the services of Google.
In an apartment complex we’re talking about 200, 300 devices that would be installed in one swoop and then all of a sudden everyone moves in. We don’t have the luxury of being able to say, ‘Hey are you a Google person or are you a Honeywell person?’
The same feeling was held by other residential builders. Bravas Group’s Sean Weiner explains that the main problem is the close ties to Google Assistant. Although Amazon and other companies are on similar paths, Google had an August 2019 requirement for new users to sign up with a Google account for Nest devices and have been able to use Google Assistant.
Google Assistant is also the only way for potential integration of Nest products with other smart home products, which raises additional challenges for these companies. More than likely, this will result in Google’s Nest goods being dented in revenue.
