The Air Rights Market: A Blue Ocean

Market Background

Air rights have benefited urban development for decades. Access to this opaque market is traditionally difficult, and the assets are traded in a closed way, reducing transactions and valuations and increasing costs to all sides of the trade. The landowner owns the rights to the airspace above their land and property.

Capital Valuations

The air rights market has a $30T TAM with the value of Manhattan locked air rights estimated to be >$500B, central London's air rights have been valued at £52B, and the drone industry that requires air rights to transit through is set to be worth $450B.

Drone Delivery

Air rights are one of the primary drivers of consumers' adoption of commercial drone delivery. Without permission to be in private airspace, drones cannot fly legally. Drone deliveries reduce traditional delivery costs by ~90% over time.

Walmart and Amazon are expanding drone delivery. Walmart now covers over 2M households by drone delivery. Their goal is to deliver to 90% of the US population, which they can reach by drone due to their current real estate portfolio. They need the low-altitude skies opened with permission from the air rights owners to do this, and SkyTrade solves this access problem.