CRE hurricane resilience is leveraging drones and AI

A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olick. Property Play covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.

The first hurricane of the 2025 Atlantic season is spinning off the East Coast, and there are sure to be more in its wake. As season after season produces more intense storms resulting in increasingly costly damage, facilities managers in commercial real estate are making property resilience a priority.

One of the ways to do that is through technology. Strides have already been made in combating wildfire risk: Companies like Pano AI, Satelytics and AiDash are incorporating satellite technology with artificial intelligence to pinpoint particular fire hazards, with major electric companies as clients. 

And similar advancements are working to reduce the risk of hurricane damage: Site Technologies employs drones to help commercial real estate facilities managers see where the vulnerabilities are in their properties and address them before those storms hit. Site was originally a construction company. 

“We teamed up with our team of experts and engineers in pavements and roofs and facades and landscaping, and we started to figure out how we need to be able to capture data from facilities to be able to do engineering work and review of the current conditions of the properties,” said Austin Rabine, Site CEO. 

Site doesn’t have its own drones, but uses freelancers across the country. Rabine says the company has surveyed roughly 13,000 properties in 15 different countries and deploys drones on an annual basis for large customers that have hundreds or thousands of facilities.

The images, once captured, can be fed into Site’s artificial intelligence platform that incorporates expertise from its own staff and analyzes the properties, providing condition and risk reports for the exterior of each facility. 

“We also identify how they should be spending their money over the next three to five years to make sure that their facility is in good condition,” said Rabine. “So we create the scopes of work and condition reports using AI, and then we have a lot of dashboarding features that allow them to sort by their worst properties or their highest-risk properties for them to be able to focus their attention on their highest needs.”

This predictive maintenance allows property and facilities managers to see the issues before they become liabilities. That’s everything from clogged drains to overgrown trees to weak roofs. 

For existing customers, Site offers to fly drones over the properties after any kind of destructive event occurs. The images can then be used as before and after assessments for insurance claims.

Site’s customers include Prologis, a major warehouse real estate investment trust, as well as Link Logistics and large national retailers. Most clients will have at least 100 properties, as companies with smaller real estate footprints can use human surveyors more easily. 

“When you have hundreds or thousands of properties, it was never really a viable option to be able to get a snapshot, on an annual basis, of your facilities until technology like this,” said Rabine.