A home has traditionally been valued for shelter, location, schools, transport links and the land beneath it. The next decade may add another category: its usefulness to machines. A driveway can already be rented, a roof can export electricity and a garage can store equipment. The more interesting change comes when the customer is software attached to a vehicle, robot, drone or energy system - able to discover capacity, agree a price and pay without a person making each decision. The premise does not require humanoid robots to outnumber people - that remains a distant and uncertain prospect. The International Federation of Robotics counted about 4.66 million industrial robots operating worldwide in 2024, whilst Morgan Stanley estimates that humanoid numbers could approach one billion only by 2050. Goldman Sachs expects the commercial robotaxi fleet to expand from roughly 7,000 vehicles in 2025 to about one million by 2030. Transactions may therefore scale faster than machines: that is, one autonomous vehicle can buy parking, electricity, cleaning and maintenance many times a day.
For a terrace house, the potential services are mundane: a driveway with a charger can sell time and electricity, a garage can provide secure overnight storage, solar panels and a home battery can export power or flexibility. Britain’s Smart Export Guarantee already requires participating suppliers to pay eligible small generators for electricity exported to the grid - a parcel bay, tool store or garden pod could support local delivery or service robots. None of this requires a household to employ anybody because the property simply supplies space, power, access and connectivity. Meanwhile, drones add a more complicated layer - a homeowner can control take-off and landing from the property with the Civil Aviation Authority asserting that operators must have the landowner’s permission to do so. But “air rights” are not an unlimited private column stretching into the sky. The Bernstein v Skyviews judgment limits a landowner’s rights to the height reasonably necessary for ordinary use and enjoyment, whilst section 76 of the Civil Aviation Act 1982 protects compliant flight at a reasonable height from claims based only on trespass or nuisance. A roof landing pad can therefore be licensed, however, charging every drone merely for passing overhead is a different proposition.
Illustrative machine uses for a London terraced house
Source: Teamblockchain
The numbers are deliberately illustrative, not forecasts. Moreover, they also should not simply be added since the same garage cannot simultaneously be an overnight hotel, service pod and storage unit. The significance is the form of the cash flow whereby, instead of one monthly rent payment, a property could receive dozens of small payments linked to measurable events.
Law will determine which revenues are bankable
For a homeowner, the first question is not the tariff but the title. HM Land Registry records whether land is freehold or leasehold and whether restrictive covenants or easements affect it. For example, covenants can prohibit business use, alterations or particular structures; leasehold guidance notes that leases commonly restrict business use or require landlord consent. Government guidance also states that running a business from home may need permission from a mortgage provider, landlord or local authority, whilst planning permission can be required where commercial activity creates a material change from ordinary residential use. Furthermore, the expression “robot easement” is useful shorthand but not always the correct legal instrument. A legal easement normally benefits identifiable dominant land and burdens servient land; HM Land Registry’s easement guidance sets out the registration requirements for qualifying express easements over registered land. A robot fleet operator with no neighbouring dominant property may therefore be better served initially by a contractual licence, access agreement or lease of a defined strip rather than by trying to create an easement in gross. The contract could specify route, hours, speed, insurance, maintenance and liability but lawyers would have to decide what structure fits the facts.
Machine property income only becomes practical if payment is cheaper than the service being bought and, in many cases, programmable. Hence, the need for alternative payment options such as digital money: a 20p fixed fee makes little sense on a 15p transaction. Cloudflare’s agent-payment documentation shows one emerging pattern: x402, created by Coinbase, uses the HTTP 402 “payment required” response so that software can receive a price, sign a stablecoin payment and obtain a receipt without opening a conventional account. Cloudflare’s Machine Payments Protocol extends the same logic to cards, stablecoins and other payment methods. These systems are currently designed for digital services, but the commercial pattern can be applied to a physical charger or secure bay when the access system can verify payment. Mastercard’s Agent Pay for Machines is explicitly aimed at machine-driven commerce across cards, bank accounts and stablecoins. The Bank of England is separately designing a future in which bank deposits, tokenised deposits and regulated stablecoins can interoperate, with programmable payments triggered by conditions. A London household might therefore quote £0.04 a minute for parking and £0.28 per kWh for charging whilst receiving ordinary sterling, even if the machine settles through a tokenised rail. Moreover, the machine’s payment method and the homeowner’s final money need not be identical. The resulting audit trail may therefore matter more than the currency; a property-linked wallet could record each authorised vehicle, charging session, landing, access event and payment. That creates a machine-readable history of utilisation rather than a homeowner’s estimate. It also makes tax and insurance exposure more visible. For lenders, the useful data would be net revenue after power costs, maintenance, platform fees and downtime, not simply the gross number of transactions.
From property value to wider economic infrastructure
Residential valuation already incorporates some durable income or cost advantages. RICS-supported research found a statistically significant 0.9% to 2% price premium for homes with solar PV in its dataset. That does not prove that a robot-ready driveway commands a premium, but it shows how recurring economic benefits can enter buyer behaviour. A future valuer could model verified machine revenue separately from conventional rent, using a higher capitalisation rate or larger discount to reflect novelty, regulation, technological obsolescence and volatile utilisation. A “machine-yield” adjustment would be an analytical device, not an existing RICS standard. Mortgage underwriting would probably move even more cautiously; MoneyHelper explains that UK lenders assess income, outgoings and employment security. Yet there is a precedent for recognising property-generated income. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac allow qualifying rental income from certain accessory dwelling units under defined conditions. If machine revenue became seasoned and transferable, a lender could eventually count only a portion of it, perhaps applying a conservative haircut or debt-service coverage test. Several years of independently verified payments under stable contracts would be a different dataset from three months of robot bookings.
Notwithstanding, the wider economic effect could be material even if individual household revenues remain modest. Autonomous transport, robotics and distributed energy all require physical infrastructure: using existing driveways, garages, roofs and batteries could lower the capital needed to build dedicated depots and charging sites whilst creating a new source of household income and making better use of assets that are idle for much of the day. It could also alter urban geography: homes close to transport nodes, with strong grid connections or useful access routes may become more productive than superficially similar properties elsewhere. However, the distributional effects cut both ways - owners with driveways, roofs, batteries and capital to upgrade them could benefit whilst renters and households in dense flats may have fewer assets to monetise. In addition, more machine traffic could create noise, congestion, fire risk and neighbourhood disputes. Certainly, councils would face new planning questions, insurers would need to price unfamiliar liabilities, and tax authorities wouldl receive increasingly granular records of casual income. The same data that makes revenue bankable also makes it harder to treat as invisible.
Ultimately, residential property would not cease to be a home, nor is every garden destined to become a depot - the more plausible change is incremental. Some houses would acquire a second balance sheet alongside their residential use, made up of small, verifiable payments for access, energy and secure space. And if those cash flows persist, then law will define the rights, payment systems will record them, valuers may capitalise them and lenders may eventually recognise part of them. The larger question is whether the automated economy builds all its infrastructure from scratch, or rents pieces of the city that already exist.
This article first appeared in Digital Bytes (3rd of November, 2026), a weekly newsletter by Jonny Fry of Team Blockchain.
How could autonomous machines transform the way properties are used and monetised?