Service · Annual retainer
Managed smart home support
The reason so much expensive technology on this island has stopped working is that nobody was looking after it. Installation is an event. Keeping a house working is a service.
In business, nobody would install a fleet of devices and then never check on them again. In luxury homes it's the default. The installer commissions the system, hands over a folder nobody reads, and the next contact is a phone call two years later when something has failed badly enough to notice.
What a retainer actually covers
- Proactive monitoring. Every controller, hub, access point and camera is watched. If something drops off, I know before you do — and usually before anyone in the house notices.
- Update management. Firmware and software updates staged and tested rather than applied blindly. This is what stops an iOS or hub update quietly breaking three automations.
- Certificate and account hygiene. The unglamorous administration — expiring certificates, renewals, account recovery details kept somewhere findable — that strands a system when it lapses.
- Pre-arrival checks. Before you fly in, the house is checked and woken up: climate on, water on, pool warming, shutters scheduled, everything verified as working.
- A named contact. Me. Not a ticket queue, not a call centre, and not someone who has to ask what system you have.
- Documentation kept current. The inventory and network map updated as things change, so the house is never dependent on one person's memory. Including mine.
This is the part I came from. Managing Apple devices at scale for businesses and schools is exactly this discipline — inventory, monitoring, staged updates, documentation — applied to thousands of devices where "it mostly works" isn't acceptable. Almost none of it has reached the residential market.
Especially if you're not here all year
Most villas on this island are occupied for part of the year. An empty house is where problems compound quietly: a failed access point in November that nobody notices until April, a camera that stopped recording in February, a heating schedule still set for summer. Monitoring turns those from an unpleasant arrival into a message you get in November.
Where you have a property manager or housekeeper, I coordinate with them directly and give them exactly the access they need — no more.
What it costs
Unlike the project work, I don't publish a figure for this one. A retainer is priced against the property — how many systems, how many devices, how often you're there, whether there's a property manager to coordinate with, and what response time you actually need. A two-bedroom apartment and a 900m² estate with a guest house are not the same commitment, and pretending otherwise with a headline price would mean overcharging one of them.
You get a fixed annual figure after the survey, before any work starts. Annual, cancellable, and available whether or not I installed the system — though for one I didn't, it begins with a survey so I know what I'm taking responsibility for.
Start with a survey
Half a day at the house, €450 fixed. A written report on what you have, what's wrong with it and what putting it right would cost — yours to keep whether or not you use me.
Book a survey →Questions
Straight answers.
Will you support a system someone else installed?
Yes, after a survey. I need to know what's there, what state it's in and whether it's documented before taking responsibility for keeping it running. Occasionally the survey finds something that needs fixing before a retainer makes sense, and I'll say so.
What's the response time?
Same working day for anything affecting the use of the house, and I'll usually have seen the alert before you send it. For genuine emergencies — no power to the plant room, security system down, water leak detection triggered — as fast as I can physically get there.
Do you need remote access to my house?
Yes, over an encrypted connection into the monitoring layer only. It's scoped to the systems I maintain, and cameras are never routed through anything of mine. I'll walk you through exactly what it can and can't reach before anything is set up.
Can my property manager have access?
Yes, and it's usually a good idea. Apple Home's sharing lets them control what they need — climate, gates, lighting — without seeing cameras or being able to change the configuration.