Delivering the Future: Industry report
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How far away is instant gratification: the near-immediate delivery of goods and parcels? This report looks at how the way we order and receive goods will change between now and 2030, and how it might look by 2060 and beyond.
In the near future, could the delivery options available to a house even come to affect what that house is worth?
1. Today’s innovation; tomorrow’s baseline:
The one-hour delivery slot, once a genuine novelty, is already the standard against which every new service is judged. 15 minutes has become the target time for urban grocery deliveries for companies such as Gopuff.
2. Drones are no longer science fiction:
Predictions that drone networks would be as familiar as postal vans by 2018 proved wildly premature, but UK airspace regulation changed again on 1 January 2026 to embed compliance directly into aircraft and pilot requirements, clearing some of the ground for wider commercial rollout.
3. The autonomous last-mile market:
Analysts value the global autonomous last-mile delivery market at around $28 billion in 2025, projecting growth to over $228 billion by 2035 at a compound annual growth rate above 23% – driven by ground delivery robots rather than the flying drones that tend to capture the headlines.
4. Where to house the warehouse?
Analysts predict a shift toward larger, taller, part-underground automated stores with rooftop solar and even drone landing strips, alongside a parallel rise of small urban ‘dark stores’ that shrink the last mile to a few streets.
5. The jig’s not up for the gig economy:
Fragmented courier networks and platform-based delivery remain central to city logistics, but they increasingly sit alongside, rather than in place of, robots and autonomous vehicles handling the more predictable, repeatable legs of the journey.
6. Delivery access may boost house prices:
Early commentary suggests homes under repeated low-level drone routes, near fulfilment hubs or on unreliable last-mile routes could see value effects in both directions – a genuinely new variable for the property market to absorb.
7. The furthest frontier of ‘instant’ delivery:
Physicists working on quantum teleportation have already moved a particle’s state across three metres with complete reliability, and openly discuss – while stressing enormous practical barriers – the theoretical possibility of ‘transporting’ larger objects in the very long term.