West of Austin, Texas, near a lake named after that technological city, is a plot of land that will mirror the innovation surrounding it when a new housing development is complete, The Vista Pointe community, as it has been designated by Clark Wilson Homes because of its lake views, might also be so-named because it's built around a vision of technology.
      The first of its kind in Austin, and maybe even among housing developments, Vista Pointe will be home to ubiquitous automation and entertainment systems. In the high-tech climate demand of Austin, demand for such innovation is high, but this is also a national trend, as the upper echelon of homebuyers demands more technology to meet its needs. As a result, high-end production homes, such as the $400,000 homes that are planned for the Vista Pointe community, are becoming increasingly high tech. What's more, homebuilders are starting to partner with residential systems integrators to get the job done right.
      "With the lake views on this project, the market niche that we're looking for is the higher-end buyer that is more sophisticated and more in tune with higher-end systems," said Clark Wilson, founder and president of Clark Wilson Homes. "Most of our clients are looking for a future-proof home that will be able to deliver things from the Internet, cable and whatnot -- everybody knows that something better is going to get invented tomorrow and they want their home to be wired and ready for that."
      To enable him to future-proof the 91 $400,000-range homes that will go into this development, Clark Wilson Homes sought a reliable and repeatable technology backbone that didn't run up the cost of the house significantly -- just in case some homebuyers were still a little hesitant about putting money down for a costly automation system.
      Clark Wilson Homes established itself as a future-oriented builder when it was founded a decade ago. Category 5 wiring has been standard in the builder's projects for half of that time, but Wilson means much more by "future-proof" when it come to the Vista Pointe development. An interchangeable system of Cat 5 jacks that allow for technology upgrades, or even just rearranging the furniture in a room, is just part of Wilson's Vista Pointe vision. He explained that "if another device comes out that's meaningful to you, you can plug it in any room and not have to go back and try to fish wire down walls and crawl through your attic-which would pretty much stop everybody from trying to face the new equipment and ideas that will come out in the future."
      The answer to all of Wilson's expectations took the form of an advanced pre-wiring infrastructure that could handle several levels of automation and control, depending on what each homebuyer required. At the center of that set-up is Panja's PHAST system, which Wilson requested directly after his personal experience with it rang true to what he hoped to provide customers. In turn, Panja tapped Austin's Dyer Electronics, a quarter-century veteran of residential systems installation. Dyer dove into production home work with this project and came up with more than a future-proof solution for Clark Wilson Homes.
      Dyer's answers were what Wilson sought, as the selling market for high-tech homes in Austin is intensely competitive. By creating a standard automation infrastructure that goes beyond simply providing Cat 5 wiring, Clark Wilson Homes hopes to stay ahead of the pack.
      "I think it is definitely the first time in the Austin market that a production builder truly tried to come up with a workable plan-not just an infrastructure panel, but truly trying to come up with a plan that does future-proof the house," said Doug Hooks, vice president of Dyer Electronics. Seeing this builder's commitment to high-tech offerings, Dyer Electronics delivered a repeatable, streamlined version of what it provides on most of its own high-end projects.
      Production builders frequently gain a bad reputation when they try to implement advanced technological offerings into their developments "because most builders don't have the infrastructure that Clark Wilson does," Hooks said. In fact, Dyer's previous experience with one production builder ensured that they would never work on that style of project again. Or so they thought. "Clark Wilson is a visionary as far as a production builder, "Hooks continued. "He knows what kind of builder he is, and he knows how to make that business profitable. But he also knows that he has to have a reputation."
      That reputation is what Wilson hangs his hat on, with extensive homebuyer surveys that carefully pontificate the building process, and ensure that improvements are made wherever necessary. So when it came to integrating automation into his projects, Wilson looked for the cream of the crop. Two other Austin integration firms work with Wilson on the lower-level Cat 5 homes he produces, but he went beyond that with this project.
      Dyer works in the extreme high-end portion of the market, primarily in the above-$70,000- to $700,000-range systems. But, if any A/V firm was ready for multiple iterations of the same installation on a production project, it was Dyer. It has its system down to a science, having built a technology infrastructure that nearly any installer can take from pre-wire to plate-out to hook-up and be consistent.
      With this system intact, going to production was a natural for Dyer. But they didn't want to cut any corners on what it offered production home buyers. Dyer produced a detailed Cat-5-based wiring infrastructure with a tie-in for sprinkler systems, HVAC, lighting control, and whole-house audio and integration.
      Clark Wilson Homes was surprised to learn that even with the variety of options the Dyer wiring infrastructure provided, the pre-wire never changes. Whether a customer wants to do multi-room distributed sound or full-blown PHAST, the wiring is still the same all the way through.
     "This is easy compared to a client that has a multi-million-dollar home," Hooks said. "In a multi-million-dollar project you're in there for two, three, even five years. And you have to have enough forethought to build your infrastructure to where you don't have to go back and tell this client that we have to tear out walls. I guess that mindset made production work easy for us."
      Among the main components of the system Dyer proposed are color-coded Leviton plates that make end-users' lives easier, and Monster Cable distibution panels. The plans not only provide ease-of-use for end users, but they leave the house literally open for future enhancements. "The way that the pre-wire was done is very modular so they can come in an upgrade my one of the wall plates to go from a simple video and networks wall plate to become a high-end wall plate that handles HDTV, two networks and DSS," said Steve Alexander, vice president of Panja. Dyer provided a entire schedule of nearly 30 additions and options ranging $50 to activate an additional phone jack, all the way up to $379 to pre-wire for a high-res video signal.
      Dyer Electronics is going to staff up to accommodate the 91 clients it is going to acquire when the Vista Pointe community is built. A new Dyer design center will supplement the 42 full -time employees that include four fulltime sales staff, three programmers, and one in-house engineer. On top of it all Dyer will maintain its retail operation, which it separated from the custom install division only four years ago.
      In addition to the design center, Dyer will also use Clark Wilson's model homes as a facility to educate customers about what technology can provide for them. In the models there will be plasmas, a full-blown home theater, music distribution, HVAC control, lighting control interfaced to security, and possibly a Panja Digital Media Processor, which will distribute broadband Internet-based music as a source.
      The two model homes, expected to open to the public in the first quarter of 2001, will show the mid-level and high-level systems available, but Dyer EIectronics' custom audio/video designer and senior sales associate, Kyle Griffith, has made it a priority that the models show nothing beyond what customers can get with the pre-wire Dyer provides.
      Griffith designed the wiring infrastructure for the project with Bill Sheets, Dyer's programming guru and senior design consultant. Griffith tried to stay around the $4,500 pre-wire package price, which Wilson agreed was optimal, since it would be a fraction of construction costs and homebuyers would have future-proofed residences for very little over what they would pay for a standard home.
      When designing the packages, Griffith kept practicality at the top of his list of priorities, incorporating a lot of conduit into his pre-wire infrastructure to allow for additions.
      "Thinking along the practicality lines, the things in the home that inevitably are most irritable to operate are in your audio/video system," Griffith said. "So, at the very minimum an most of the packages I've got a PHAST cinema system to run the family room and get rid of those eight remotes. But it can be linked to the whole house controller, so if you want to do lights off of your touch panel, you can. And each touch panel is customizable so that we can put the customer's name on there and we can change it to suit them."
      Sticking with practicality, Dyer is going to make lighting control almost a standard on these houses. Three levels of packages are being offered, with an 'ultimate' package available above those, and complete customization also available. The first sixteen-home phase is expected to be complete for a grand opening to the public in the first quarter of 2001. In another technological home-buying innovation, Clark Wilson Homes plans to put up a website for all home buyers so they can watch their homes progress and make decisions at various stages.
     "'We very much want to start creating a presence for our types of systems in production homes," Alexander said. "As we get further into this production builder market space, I think we're going to find more and more customers wanting to buy technology with the mortgage."
      Hooks agreed that many CEDIA members such as himself will be doing production work in the future. "All homes ultimately will be wired with this in mind. I'm not so arrogant to say that all homes will be wired this way. But all homes will be wired for home networking-not just computers, but appliances and audio/video and lighting," he said. "But it's gonna be the guys that actually go in and create a standard. Whether they adhere to our color-coded plates or their color-coded plates, they have to create a standard that is easy to duplicate."
      There are a great many companies out there that have already started doing this, Hooks said. "But it takes a fairly financially secure company to take on a production builder like a Clark Wilson. Because you're going to have a lot of man-power and a lot of materials, and you've got to deal with their payment schedules. You also have to have enough people available for service. And you have to make it to where anybody can walk into that house and know what that jack is supposed to do."

Kirsten Nelson is managing editor for Residential Systems