Landing pads, special mailboxes and more: A future where delivery drones buzz through neighbourhoods could prompt architects and builders to rethink.
4 min
Let’s say you want a hamburger.
With a few taps on your phone—no onions, please—the order is placed, with delivery set for within the hour. Soon, your specially wrapped burger appears on the horizon, borne aloft by a humming drone. A retractable door on your rooftop opens to reveal a landing pad and delivery receptacle. The drone places the burger into a box, preferably heated, and a small elevator brings it into the house. “Ding.” Your app alerts you that your burger is warm and waiting.
It’s getting closer: A future where droves of drones buzz through neighbourhoods to drop off and pick up groceries, food orders and packages. Architects and builders might have to rethink overall home design to accommodate remote delivery, with drone landing pads mounted on kerbside mailboxes, built onto rooftops or perched on windowsills. This, in turn, could reshape entire neighbourhoods to include designated drone airspace and traffic patterns designed to ensure the safety of residents.
Drone divisions created by Amazon.com Inc., United Parcel Service and Google’s parent Alphabet Inc. have all received permission from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration for limited deliveries, paving the way for commercial drone service. Amazon Prime Air is testing technology to deliver packages weighing up to 2.26kg in 30 minutes or less. Alphabet’s Wing trials in Christiansburg, Va., allow residents to get deliveries from FedEx Corp., Walgreens and local restaurants. In Florida, UPS subsidiary Flight Forward and CVS Health Corp. deliver prescription medications to residents of the Villages, the largest retirement community in the U.S.
Still, none of the major players have figured out a seamless way for consumers to receive their deliveries at home. Cargo landing in backyards and driveways raises safety questions regarding both people and packages.
At least one tech startup is working on a solution. Valqari, a Chicago company founded in 2017, is developing drone-delivery mailboxes that can accept all types of shipments, from retail packages to restaurant meals. The top of the mailbox acts as a landing pad, and the drone activates a retractable door to a space where packages can be safely deposited, explains Valqari founder and chief executive Ryan Walsh.
Mr Walsh says he envisions drone-delivery mailboxes mounted on rooftops and windowsills of homes or part of a centralized bank of mailboxes that can serve a neighbourhood or apartment complex. Someday, drone-delivery mailboxes will be “as common as a garage,” he says.
The idea isn’t far-fetched. In South Florida, the Paramount Miami Worldcenter condo building was designed to include a “skyport,” a platform on the roof that could someday accommodate vertical takeoff and landing, or VTOL, vehicles as a shuttle for residents. While the possibility of air taxis is years away, “I could see package delivery as happening sooner,” says developer Dan Kodsi, chief executive of Royal Palm Cos. “We have capability because elevators run all the way to the roof.” He adds that the skyport concept has been a selling point at Paramount Miami, where apartments are for sale from about US$750,000 to US$11 million for a penthouse. “Some people bought [units] knowing that it could potentially raise the value of their property,” he says.
Another concept for potentially incorporating drone delivery into residential development comes from Walmart Inc. The retailer <a”icon none” href=”https://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?PageNum=0&docid=20190300202&IDKey=1EE7B2FDEDBE&HomeUrl=http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1%26Sect2=HITOFF%26d=PG01%26p=1%26u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.html%26r=1%26f=G%26l=50%26s1=20190300202.PGNR.%26OS=%26RS=” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>submitted a patent application for a delivery chute mounted onto an apartment building. Drone deliveries would be dropped through the chute and onto a conveyor belt, which would transport packages into the building’s mailroom for distribution.
When the majority of homes are outfitted with drone-delivery mailboxes and landing pads, they could form the cornerstone of “smart cities,” Mr Walsh projects. Outfitted with solar panels, the mailboxes could provide their own electricity—and even generate enough electricity to sell back to the grid. Data from meteorological sensors could ensure that drones will be able to land safely, with the added benefit of making weather forecasting hyper-local. Masses of mailboxes would also provide a place to put transportation sensors that could report real-time road and traffic conditions or telecom technology that could bolster wireless signals, making cities smarter. Mapping sensors would be particularly useful in remote or rural areas, which tend to be the least mapped.
Enthusiasts say that drone deliveries require less manpower than delivery trucks and would reduce both traffic congestion and fuel emissions. But before hamburgers can fly through the sky, a lot of things have to happen. Chief among them is a drone air-traffic control system to manage unmanned aircraft and protect the airspace from attacks. Currently, the FAA is working on a way to link drone registration to uniform tracking requirements, allowing the agency to identify drone operators and digitally follow their vehicles from takeoff to landing. Tech innovators must ensure that collision-avoidance technology can avert drone crashes. And companies themselves must surmount logistical challenges in stocking, deploying and recharging drones.
On the consumer end, the public will want assurances that their peace and privacy is protected. For example, in Australia, drone-delivery trials by Wing resulted in complaints from residents in suburban Canberra that the crafts were noisy and intrusive. Based on that feedback, Wing developed new propellers that emit a quieter, lower-pitched sound, an Alphabet representative says. In terms of privacy, she added that drone cameras take still, low-resolution images that are used strictly for navigation.
Overall, the main concern is safety, says German academic Mario Schaarschmidt, who specialises in logistics, technology and innovation management in services. Earlier this year, Dr Schaarschmidt and his colleagues at the University of Koblenz-Landau released a paper that aimed to assess whether consumers would willingly adopt drone deliveries. People who were interviewed in the research most frequently cited fears about their personal safety as well as financial risks of property loss.
Over time, Dr Schaarschmidt thinks widespread drone deliveries could become the norm for homes, “but only if the first deliveries with drones go smoothly. If you experience any problems, people won’t accept them.”
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Georgetown agent Jamie Peva blends history and real estate on Instagram, turning local stories into a powerful sales strategy.
5 min
On a recent morning in Georgetown—Washington, D.C.’s oldest neighborhood—real-estate agent Jamie Peva strode down leafy N Street, brimming with historical tidbits.
Jackie Kennedy once lived on the street, he said. So did Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of the Washington Post, along with a former Miss America and a powerful U.S. Senator. Bradlee’s widow, author Sally Quinn, and Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, own stately homes there.
“I’ve seen a picture of Lyndon Johnson coming out of this house,” said Peva, passing a Federal-style brick mansion. “Also, the Beatles went to a lawn party here.”
Peva, a 60-year-old agent with Washington Fine Properties, has sold Georgetown real estate for over three decades, often traversing the neighborhood by bicycle. Of the roughly 2,500 houses in the historic neighborhood, he has been involved in the sale of 460, he estimated. A self-styled historian of the neighborhood, he knows stories behind its houses and their owners going back generations.
With a knack for lively storytelling, he shares his knowledge with some 37,500 Instagram followers, who have made Peva—sporting the bow ties he has worn since boarding school—an unlikely social-media influencer. Many of his followers are locals, and most have no plans to buy or sell real estate—until they do. It is then, according to Peva, that his spirited reels bring him to mind.
“It’s the digital version of a refrigerator magnet,” he said.
After Peva’s first video in November 2023, his eponymous Instagram account sparked a 10% increase in sales volume in the first year, and another 20% the next, he estimated. “It’s been very good for business, there is no question about it,” he said.
But Peva’s posts have also made him a local celebrity. As he walked down N street, the driver of a Mercedes station wagon slowed down to honk and wave. A lady walking a large dark gray dog stopped to ask what he was filming that day (a reel about a Colonial-era bottling plant.) Peva knew the dog from walking his two springers, Jumpy and Peggy-O, in the neighborhood.
“I need to make a video about the pooches of Georgetown,” he mused.
A growing number of real-estate agents now use social media to sell, and some have millions of followers with reels featuring ultraluxury pads, selling tips or reality TV-style reports on their daily lives. While Peva posts about his listings—and sometimes those of other agents—he mostly focuses on Georgetown history, local businesses and community events, saying his goal is to benefit both his business and the neighborhood.
“If we don’t find something genuinely interesting and worth sharing, we won’t do it,” said Peva’s daughter, Violet Peva, a New York social-media strategist who films, edits and posts his reels. “We cover many topics, not just real-estate information.”
Peva is originally from Connecticut, but has lived in Georgetown for over 30 years, currently in a cottage-style house with a white picket fence. Over the years, Georgetown has changed. The Georgetown Set, a powerful group of Cold War-era residents whose Sunday-night potluck dinners are said to have swayed U.S. policy, has long faded away. The community is still home to high-profile Washingtonians, including a Republican senator and several cabinet members. But it increasingly also attracts technology and finance executives, according to Peva. He now routinely signs nondisclosure agreements, ensuring privacy for wealthy clients. The shift has made him rethink his marketing approach.
“For years, a big part of our Georgetown business was made up of people who maintained a low profile,” he said. Real-estate agents were similarly low-key. Today, curb appeal is more important, he said, and agents are promoting themselves more. “As this change was underfoot, I was thinking that I needed to evolve myself too,” he said.
Though his own social-media use is mostly limited to following sailing accounts, he asked his daughter to help him post his listings online. Violet, now 26, started coming to D.C. once a month to film his reels. After an early video, on a condominium building called the Elliott, her sister Fern called her to report: “Daddy’s blowing up on Instagram,” Violet recalled. The reel got over 50,000 views. The next two each drew over 300,000. Peva’s most popular post ever, with over 838,000 views, was about the Grateful Dead playing in Georgetown. Sometimes, Peva interviews Georgetowners such as Quinn, the author, or Jamie Stachowski, the owner of a local butcher shop.
Peva, who majored in history in college, now spends up to two hours a day on research, usually in the morning while on his stationery bike. Online, he pores over old newspapers or the Library of Congress website, and he has a collection of articles and books—in and out of print—about Georgetown.
Companies often approach Peva for promotional posts, he said, but he turns them down, feeling that followers would lose interest in constant commercials. One exception is a recent paid post on Mount Vernon, the former home of George Washington. Peva wanted to share its history, he said, and didn’t want to lose the opportunity to another Instagrammer.
Anthony Arend, a professor at Georgetown University, has lived in his current home for 19 years without any plans to sell or buy real estate. But he follows Peva and often likes his posts.
“He is very charismatic, he is energetic, and he obviously knows a lot about the community,” said Arend, who has referred house-hunting friends to Peva.
One of Peva’s biggest deals—the $10.5 million sale of a 19th-century Italianate mansion—came after he made two 2024 reels featuring the property. In March, he sold the longtime O Street home of Tim and Jane Matz for $5.8 million after featuring it on his Instagram. Peva had showed them the home 25 years earlier, with Violet in a baby carrier on his back.
Last year, Kate Watts, 49, a digital consultant, called Peva to sell her late father’s three-bedroom house on Q Street; her husband had seen Peva on Instagram. In an October reel, Peva praised the architecture of the house, designed by modernist Hugh Newell Jacobsen. Halfway through, he mentioned an open house the next day, ending with an upbeat: “Did I also mention this house is for sale? $3.75 million!” The reel got 27,000 views, the open house was packed, and the buyers made an offer at the list price on the same day.
