The Invisible Railroads - The Riches of a New Frontier
Cell Towers Insatiable Data and Density Demand Proves That Infrastructure Wins
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. “
We are witnessing the dawn of a new gold rush, it's not underground, it’s over our heads.
The mainstream conversation is fixated on drone and flying car hardware. Venture capital is showering startups with billions. The media obsesses over electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL) renderings and celebrity test flights. But what is almost everyone missing?
The scarce resource in the low-altitude economy isn’t the aircraft. It’s the airspace.
Just as oil needed pipelines and cars needed highways, drones and flying vehicles need airspace corridors, which air rights owners control. Permissioned slices of sky that can be accessed, leased, and monetized. The growth is wholly reliant on who owns the sky they fly through.
The blueprint for the next wave of infrastructure is invisible control layers on top of visible spaces. Drones and flying car networks will reshape urban logistics, real estate premiums, and social mobility.
When Real Estate Stops at the Roofline
In most common law legal systems, such as the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and others, property rights extend upward to a certain altitude (usually 500 feet). Not only must drones fly below 400 feet, but all airborne machines must fly in and out of this airspace at various times and locations.
This often forgotten slice of airspace has very valuable rights. In real estate, they offer growth and optionality. Cell towers in air rights parcels are essential to our daily lives. The air rights assets are being utilized in an opaque and cumbersome way. Now, with drones and flying cars, there is another valuable use case and a need to bring the whole market to the digital world.
Sky corridors are leased like lanes on a toll road. Drone operators, flying taxis, and other companies pay to access them to increase their addressable market. Not only this, but without the permission, they are grounded and are playing with expensive toys. Think of it as packets of altitude with yield and growth.
Expansion Globally
Shandong province recently leased its low-altitude airspace for $130 million and not for runways or buildings, but for permission to operate and manage the sky itself. 400 air routes are planned in Shanghai alone. Cities like Shenzhen are selling aerial corridors like railroad plots in the 1860s. By 2035, China’s low-altitude economy could top $490 billion, according to their own civil aviation authority.
The developers behind the upcoming Las Vegas Spaceport acquired air rights near Allegiant Stadium. Their plan: a vertiport for shuttling high-rollers straight from the Strip. It’s not a gimmick. It’s an urban sky terminal, and its the first of many. Vegas isn’t betting on vehicles. It’s betting on infrastructure. The FAA has already approved Metroplex reconfigurations and is preparing for the privatly owned and managed multi-layered airspace system above American cities. While others are talking, the real money is quietly acquiring the aerial equivalents of railroads.
Without Air Rights, Flying Cars Don’t Work
Joby, Archer and other air taxi companies are exciting, no doubt. They’re leading the FAA certification race and building real aircraft. But even if they succeed technically, they’ll hit a wall commercially unless they solve for airspace access. Because here’s the secret of flying cars and commercial drones:
You can’t just fly. You have to pay for permission.
These companies can’t scale without air rights to low-altitude airspace. They’ll get locked into luxury tourism routes, forever stuck as novelty rides for the rich. The moment they try to operate at scale, they’ll be forced to negotiate with air rights owners. That is why homeowners, real estate developers, and telecoms companies want an open, non-governmental marketplace that aggregates the altitude and brings forward the payment rails for the air rights.
The Investment Alpha
There are $500 billion of under-utilised air rights in NYC alone. Another $52 billion in central London. These are two major cities as an example, but the globe has thousands of air rights gold mines above all our heads. To get exposure, investors can acquire options on leased airspace, like they can (if they have access) to cell tower lease yields or mineral rights. These generate stable yield from telecom equipment, drone routes, or vertiport access. It’s infrastructure in the sky.
Sky Needs
In the past, ownership meant what was beneath your feet - digging land to plant crops, toiling for utility. The future is what’s above the rooflines. Just like spectrum, this will start cheap and then become priceless.
Decentralized airspace auctioned, licensed, fractionalized, securitized, optionalized, mapped and enforced by digital ledgers. It’s about being bought and sold with the same precision as digital ads, and accessed by anyone.
Railroads have shown that dynastic money creation was not in owning a railcar or the physical tracks; it was in owning the land on which the tracks were built. As the future approaches, the past lessons guide us.
