Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

Tag: aerial imagery

  • Views from the Junction

    Shot on DJI Mavic Mini

  • Maeklong Railway Market — plan view

    Many of you have probably visited or seen videos of the Maeklong Railway Market in Bangkok. (I’ve done the latter, not the former.) It is one of the largest seafood markets in Thailand and it is literally housed on the railway’s tracks. Every time a train passes through, the entire market needs to be pulled up and relocated. Even the awnings that cover the market need to be collapsed. The videos I’ve seen have all been taken from grade. But the below video (via Vala Afshar on Twitter), showing the market in plan view (from what was likely a drone), is arguably even more impactful. There isn’t a foot of wasted space.

  • DroneBase — real estate aerials

    image

    Real estate companies often have a need for aerial photography. Perhaps you want to showcase an existing building. Perhaps you want to capture the views from a future/proposed building. Or perhaps you’d like to document a building under construction.

    Usually in the latter case, you have to find a neighboring building and negotiate some sort of agreement so that you can place a camera on it and document your construction site. This is probably still the solution if you want a clean time lapse video.

    But drones have opened up a new world of possibility and today I thought I would share with you a company called DroneBase. They’ll probably hate that I’m making this reference, but one way to describe them is Uber for drones. They connect a “large network of drone pilots” to customers needing drone footage for commercial or creative purposes.

    If you take a look at their website, you’ll see that they cater a lot to the real estate and construction industries. I’m not sure how active they are in Toronto and Canada right now, but if they aren’t that active I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before they are. 

    And over time, I am sure that a network like this will only mean faster, better, and more affordable aerial footage.