You may have heard that Amazon will begin sending out delivery drones to expedite “emergency” package deliveries. Their service, called Amazon Prime Air, doesn’t have a rollout date yet but it will likely come with a large price tag attached to it. According to information Amazon has released thus far, there will be different-sized drones for delivering different types of packages. A customer will also need an Amazon delivery pad so that the drone knows where to land but it should be light enough and small enough to be folded up and put away when not in use.
Amazon is touting the ability of its drones to move up to 60 mph and deliver items in less than 30 minutes after being ordered while a countdown on your app will let you know exactly when your items will arrive. The drones will only have an approximately 15-mile range, so a customer would need to live within 7.5 miles of the fulfillment center before the drone’s batteries would need a boost.
What’s interesting is that Amazon recently filed a patent for these drones to take photos and video of a customer’s house when making a delivery. According to the patent, the drones would use image or video recognition to notice “anomalies, inconsistencies, irregularities, or aberrations” at homes. Amazon would then use this information to recommend potential services to the customer: windows, roof repair, yard help, etc.
This makes us start to wonder how the future of home-buying could be changed with this kind of technology. If a customer signs off on the collection of these images and Amazon puts them into a database, is it feasible to think that one day you could take very close looks at homes you may want to buy? You may even be able to very closely browse homes for sale or find homes in your area that match your current style or have the features for which you’re looking. With virtual reality finding its place in the world of home buying and selling right now, it seems like this kind of technology could be used to create entire virtual neighborhoods to be explored when you want to purchase a house.
What do you think about this technology and Amazon’s patent? What do you see as the pros and the cons to this in the world of home sales?