Wow, this post is really specific. What special hardware is required on a drone for "real estate inspection"?

I believe it could be the weight of the camera and lens you would desire for good looking photos (think Sony a7 size). Good looking photos sell houses.

EDIT I just noticed the “inspection” part. Maybe they wanted good zoom to spy on the tenants? (Or maybe that’s a really uncharitable take).

To me, high quality photos for real estate inspection means (e.g.) being able to take high resolution photos of a specific part of the roof so you can understand why there’s a leak. Not having to climb is a big deal!

The company is still thriving, you can check out their website to find out more about what real estate inspection is about (in The Netherlands): https://www.aeroscan.nl/

The high-end Falcon models were an engineering marvel and, as you say, nothing else in the market was even close.

I don't know about "real estate inspection", but another use case was for them to be used in oil rigs in the North Sea to inspect the structure of the rig itself. They had to be self-stabilizing under high winds and adverse weather conditions, and they had to carry a good enough camera to take detailed photos.

Unfortunately, while the technology was there, the market wasn't. Not many wanted to get a $35K drone to be able to sustain this business.

Exactly, but surely they weren't actually losing money? Why not keep the business afloat selling expensive drones to specialty companies until the broader market picked up as they envisioned it would when they bought the company. I think we paid more like $25k for our Falcons, though buying them wasn't on my side of the company. We would have gladly pay $35k for a next gen Falcon if they ever made one. Now DJI makes good enough drones for less than $10k, but there's a chance we still would've went with Intel just we could tell our customers we weren't flying Chinese drones.

In real estate inspection, we had the same sort of concerns, can't fly too close to the object for safety reasons, and we need high resolution photos to determine quality of the masonry, paintwork and roofing etc..