Rise of the Drones? Real Estate Tech Goes Airborne!

Want to get a bunch of real estate pros fired up? Get ‘em going on the drones. Tom Flanagan from inman.com recently caught up with Matt Murphy of Boston Visual Imaging for a live and in-person demonstration of some of Murphy’s airborne imaging devices, which are being used by tech-savvy agents to give prospective buyers an unprecedented peek at homes on the market.

Drones in real estate? It’s really happening. Photo by Scott Gerami.

It might freak you out to see a drone hovering over your home, but take comfort: these devices, with their onomatopoeic hum reminiscent of a couple thousand hornets, are here to help you… and they bear a much closer resemblance to your kid’s RC helicopter than the scary unmanned aircraft used by the military. Drones have the ability to capture (by both video and still images) footage of home amenities that might otherwise go wastefully un-highlighted. The drones are gaining a foothold in the higher-end real estate market, when drone-assisted vistas of sweeping staircases and vaulted ceilings provide the next-best thing to an in-person showing. A lot of the drones in use, including Murphy’s, were designed in garages and at kitchen tables, using hobby helicopter blades and GoPro cameras mounted underneath. They may only get six minutes of airtime, but these humble drones are harbingers of what experts say is the next big thing in real estate.

Drone technology in real estate is still in its infancy, and the FAA is still sorting out the legality and laws surrounding such aircrafts, so this is still very much a growing field. Still, it’s hard to deny that this is some of the most exciting buzz (ha – see what we did there?) to come from the industry in a long time. In a day and age when savvy real estate pros recognize that the same, stale techniques used by generations past just aren’t going to cut the mustard, drones are an intriguingly cutting-edge and useful tool to consider.