Drones are the new black

Drones are the new black in real estate. Everyone wants one so it is no surprise that, for some companies, they are starting to become indispensable.

Allianz X, the venture unit of insurer Allianz Group, is so committed to using drones that it has invested in the drone-based entrerprise FairFleet, which was founded by Allianz Digital Accelerator entrepreneur Eldar Gizzatov. As an insurer, Allianz has a vested interest in drone technology improving its claims processes after disasters, so the natural next step was to roll out the technology for regular site inspections.

‘Drones can be very useful for façade inspections and to obtain marketing photos,’ said Alexander Engelfried, business development lead at FairFleet at EXPO REAL earlier this month.

FairFleet operates 1,500 drones from Chinese producer DJI, which is headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong. ‘They can fly up to 70km an hour and tolerate wind speeds of 50km an hour. Their drones can fly to within 5km of a given building, weather conditions permitting,’ Engelfried explained.

However, even drones can be fallible, according to Allianz’s CEO François Trausch: ‘They don’t always work,’ he admitted. ‘We tried to use one in China recently but when the pilot got up there it was just too cloudy.’

Nonetheless, DJI drones come equipped with 36 to 50 mega pixel resolution image sensors, which also enables photos to be taken from further away, Engelfried said.

FairFleet charges between €290 and €2,500 for a drone inspection, depending on the complexity of the visit.

Another company getting in on the act is JLL, according to Frank Weber, head of industrial agency in Germany: ‘We started using drones for site visits in April this year,’ he told REFIRE. ‘We now have two teams equipped with drones. At the moment, we are only using drones to do site visits of industrial properties. It’s more impressive as someone considering renting the warehouse gets a better idea of the layout and the surrounding area.’

It typically costs between €300 and €500 for a site visit via external service providers, according to Weber, which is why JLL took the decision to purchase its own drones at a cost of €1700 each. ‘We now put all of the photos they take into our database. Owners/renters see us as a modern, up-to-date broker as a result,’ Weber added.

Germany has reached a good legal framework, thanks to the Ministry of Transportation. Drones under 5kg, like JLL’s, can be used without special permission from the government. ‘You do need to ask permission from neighbouring tenants, though,’ Weber said. ‘There are also certain signal corridors where the drones are not allowed to fly. Our Polish operations are also using drones for site visits,’ he added.

However, despite being the most popular consumer drones in the world, not all organizations are prepared to use DJI products. The Pentagon reportedly issued a recent memo to its staff to cease all use of DJI applications due to concerns over security threats. DJI has access to a range of flight data and information from your phone’s audio feed, and the video feed from your drone, which is stored on its US, Chinese, and Hong Kong servers. However, this is less of an issue for European real estate firms who, for the most part, are not dealing with particularly sensitive data.

‘I think we’ll see more and more companies using drones going forward because they’re very efficient,’ Weber said.