BOYS AND THEIR TOYS! Quad Copter for Real Estate!

[Karen Margrave]

As many of you know, we are in Orange County, CA, and build new, spec construction. Whether or not a property will have a view isn't always obvious. It may have NO view on the first floor, but 2nd or 3rd story may have views.

Until moving to southern California, we never dealt with terms like peek a boo ocean views, filtered view, etc., but now it's important to know exactly what type of view if any a property has.

Michael (our son and partner) does our architectural designs. He bought a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) or Quad Copter with a GoPro camera attached. Now he can go to a vacant lot, hover up to various elevations, do a 360 and take pics. We then can see if there's any view! Aside from that it will be great for adding video to our website, etc., even doing walkthroughs!

I just thought I'd post in case anyone else has issues like these and are looking for solutions. Down here an ocean view can mean a lot more money, so it's well worth it to us.

Aside from all the useful stuff, they're cool to operate.

[Jon Holdman]

The most recent episode of "Gold Rush" was a bunch of "the making of" behind the scenes stuff. They were using a hexa copter version to get some shots. They had a few issues, like one of them going bonkers and taking off on its own, and another one getting whacked out of the air by an excavator bucket. But they had some pretty amazing shots. If you watch this show (silly, I know and no doubt as realistic as the house flipping shows) the opening sequence has a shot looking down a waterfall from above. That was done with one of these copter cameras.

I think as long as you're with eyesight of your drone you're probably OK. Personally I want the remotely pilotable one so I can set at my desk and drive over to look at a property. Even better would be one that could knock on the door and have a look at whatever the tenant is calling about.