Six disciplines. One deal. One firm.
Siting a drone manufacturing facility on airport land requires all six of these at once. Assemble them from six different advisors and the deal is only as good as the seams between them.
Airport-Specific Expertise
This goes first because it is the constraint that disqualifies deals after they have been agreed. Federal grant assurances obligate an airport to charge fair market rent, to avoid revenue diversion and to preserve aeronautical use of aeronautical land — obligations that survive changes in leadership and outlast most leases. Rates-and-charges methodology, through-the-fence agreements, land-use compatibility, Part 139 implications and FAA airspace review all shape what an airport can lawfully sign, and none of them are obvious to a tenant or to a commercial broker. We work inside those constraints from the first meeting rather than discovering them in month seven.
Aerospace Engineering
A manufacturer's stated requirement and its actual requirement are rarely the same document. What matters is runway length and surface, usable airspace and the availability of test corridors, hangar clear height and door geometry, apron loading, three-phase power and backup, the RF environment the aircraft has to fly in, and the sequence in which manufacturing, integration and flight test have to sit relative to one another. Reading those requirements correctly is what separates a site that works from a site that leases well and then cannot support the program.
Financial Engineering & Capital Markets
Somebody has to pay for the building, and the tenant usually cannot. We structure the capital: PropCo/OpCo separations, ground-lease financing, tax-exempt and special facility bonds, industrial revenue bonds, venture debt, equipment finance and sale-leaseback. Equally important is the underwriting question nobody enjoys asking — whether a pre-revenue manufacturer financed on program expectations survives a fifteen-year lease term, and what protection the landlord holds if it does not.
Real Estate Development
Entitlement, environmental review, site work, utilities, build-to-suit design and delivery, construction schedule and contingency. The development questions that decide these deals are allocation questions: who carries entitlement risk, who carries cost escalation, who owns the improvements at expiration, and what happens to a purpose-built aerospace facility if the tenant leaves in year six.
Real Estate Tenant Representation Connectivity
Tenant demand surfaces inside the national brokerage networks before it reaches a public solicitation. Being connected into tenant-rep flow means an airport hears about a requirement while its site can still be shaped to fit, rather than responding to an RFP already written around somebody else's runway. We bring that connectivity and translate it — a tenant-rep broker's requirement sheet is not a technical specification, and treating it as one is a common and expensive mistake.
State & Local Government Relations
Incentives, workforce development funding, site-readiness programs, county zoning and permitting, and the local political work that determines whether a project is welcomed or litigated. These are not a closing formality. Incentive agreements carry clawbacks tied to job and investment thresholds; entitlement conditions can rewrite a site plan; and approvals pursued in the wrong order routinely invalidate one another. We sequence them.
What we do not do
We are not a brokerage and we do not list space. We are not engineers of record, and we do not stamp drawings. We are not your lawyers, and we do not issue legal opinions on grant assurances or lease compliance — we tell you where the problem is and make sure the right specialist is looking at it before it becomes expensive.
What we do is hold the whole deal. One firm, accountable for the outcome, fluent enough in all six disciplines to see the collision between them before it happens.
Put this to work on a specific site.
Tell us the airport, the platform and where the project is stuck. The first read is usually short and usually useful.
Contact Fabius Group