The city of San Antonio expects to see an additional 6,200 new luxury rental apartment units become available by the end of 2008. In Toronto, now called the Condo Kingdom by local pundits, 33,980 units are under construction, more than are now under development in Manhattan, Chicago or Los Angeles. Only Miami exceeds Toronto's pace, where properties like Jade Ocean, Jade Beach, and Asia continue to make the crane the national bird of South Florida.

A shift in the residential construction market has been away from single-family home to multiple dwelling unit (MDU) properties, which offer developers potentially more bang for the construction dollar. However, in some markets the pace of new MDU construction is creating a glut of its own. That's why several builders have planned to include a broad array of automation technologies that they're counting on to differentiate their products and entice buyers, many of whom are expected to be empty-nesters and younger retirees coming from houses where they have already become used to a certain degree of integrated AV, automation, and security systems.

"Projects like the Jade properties and Asia at Brickell Beach are becoming the templates for the future of MDU systems," says Pete Baker, vice president of sales and marketing for control systems maker RTI. "They've provided for structured cabling from the very beginning, the subsystems they're putting in are logically tied together, and they've partnered with systems integrators that are scaled to be able to meet the needs of the projects."

Systems manufacturers agree that developers of residential housing should be looking at IP as the backbone for MDUs. Devices that are IP-addressable mean a larger pool of products to choose from, since the Internet provides implicit compatibility; it enables wireless and server-based systems to be more widely implemented within units; and in particular it addresses one of the biggest concerns when it comes to putting multiple units onto a common system: data security.

"Every endpoint on the system is specifically designed to require a programmed permission to be used," explains Chad Gillenwater, vice chariman of AVI-SPL, created by the merger in June of national integrators AVI and SPL, resulting in what is now the world's largest professional systems integrator, with residential projects ongoing in North America and the Middle East. "The security of the devices is pretty much built into the operating systems' own firewall and other security measures, just as it is on your PC. With the permissions in place, one unit owner can respond to a doorbell by activating the lobby security camera, tilting and panning it if necessary, and having control of the camera and its content for the time it takes to answer the ring. That way, no one else in another unit can watch who's calling on them."

Another challenge particular to MDU environments will be the fact that any propertywide software will have to be periodically updated. This argues strongly for an IP-based approach. "The touch panels in the unit are the common port of entry for information and for system updates," says Baker.