Drone applications in Real Estate
My husband told me about a recent discussion panel on Churchill Club where CEOs of pioneering companies were talking about the use of Drones in different industries including Real Estate. One CEO Jonathan Downey of Airware was discussing discussing the use of drones in high risk areas such as inspecting power lines and cleaning exteriors of skyscrapers.
The use of consumer drones is at its infancy but the buzz about the use of these high flying sensors have some innovative companies looking for adoption of these drones in their businesses. This jives with other uses of Drones where they are being used to inspect electrical power lines or helping prevent illegal poaching of Elephants in Africa.
Use of Drones in property management such as cleaning or inspection could cut the risk involved in some of these professions. But what about using Drones to preview properties for a home buyer? Will we see a day where each real estate company uses their own drones to create real time videos of their listing and allow their clients to preview these homes and properties?
We are far from solving the regulatory hurdle to be able to fly commercial drones for these kinds of applications. Some of these hurdles are privacy and safety concerns. For instance, if our company deploys a Drone to take aerial photos of the listings, what happens if the photo includes the neighbors backyard? After all the airspace above your home is restricted airspace and no one should be flying anything above your house let alone a Drone with a Camera.
Some fo these companies are developing traffic and surveillance standards in conjunction with NASA since you can just imagine how many of these Drones could be flying all over the place in a Metro area. Add to that other commercial applications of Drones for delivering packages and mail which we suspect are years off from realization given the regulatory hurdles that these companies have to climb.
For one thing, I would not mind a drones that could clean our gutters so my husband does not risk his life climbing the roof? What other real estate applications do you see for Drones?