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To be clear, while you can fly a drone indoors, I’m not actually talking about capturing interior drone video. Instead, I’m just talking about adding interior real estate video to your repertoire as a drone pilot. Certainly, this all depends on the niche that you’re trying to serve as a drone pilot. But if you’re doing residential real estate, I’m honestly not sure how you’re getting any work at all if you don’t provide the agent with a complete package. It’s been my experience that if you just offer drone photos/video, you will get sporadic calls from agents, at best. The better alternative is to either work with a real estate photographer or have someone on your team that is able to handle interior photos and video.
In my drone business, we use a Phantom 4 Pro, which has been hands down the best drone we’ve ever owned. When we first got started, we purchased an Inspire 1 Pro, but quickly realized that the extra time and effort used to set up the Inspire wasn’t actually worth the additional quality we were getting, especially considering the battery life.
But one that thing was beneficial from this purchase is that it allowed us to later purchase a DJI Osmo, which has an attachment you can purchase to connect that X5 camera from the Inspire 1 Pro to the Osmo. There’s also a version of the Osmo that allows you to just use your phone as the camera, which could totally be the way to go if you have a decent phone.
It was an easy choice to purchase the Osmo, since at that point it was largely an add-on. Not only that, but having an Osmo basically requires no additional skills because you are using the same DJI interface with an Osmo that you are using when flying a DJI drone.
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What we also quickly realized though, was that essentially having a ground camera to grab some quick B-roll type footage added another dimension to our videos. We’ve all unfortunately seen the drone videos that provide nothing but endless drone footage. Don’t get me wrong, I do love good drone footage. But I’ve come to the conclusion that videos with just drone footage tend to get a bit boring, and it gets boring fast. This is probably even more true to the average consumer, which is likely the target market for residential real estate. What the real estate agent is paying you to create is a piece of marketing for them. Don’t forget this. It isn’t about impressing your drone-loving friends, it’s about selling something (most likely property) for your client.
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Not only that, but a real estate agent does not want to hire a photographer, a videographer and a drone pilot to get the media they need to list and sell a property. If you can be the one to get rid of the friction and produce all of the media, including an edited video with interior real estate video work, you will land more residential real estate work. This is why incorporating interior and ground video footage is an awesome opportunity to differentiate yourself from other providers of drone services.
Here’s an example of a short video we put together for a real estate agent for a home near us that sold within a week of listing. In this video we tried to pull in the drone video for the wow effect, but otherwise provided what the real estate agent needed and the consumer wanted to see: a walk-through of the home.
This is truly the benefit of video for a real estate agent. As drone pilots I sometimes wonder if we get so carried away by the idea of sweet drone footage and forget that we need to first meet client needs when shooting. I think this approach does both.
Using this tactic actually led to a contract with a local real estate agent who wanted us to provide photographs and videos for all of his properties. And because we knew we’d be getting multiple listings to shoot, we were able to provide him with a price that was more competitive than if we were shooting one individual property.
The beauty of this is that you don’t have to be the person that does it all, you just have to be willing to work with someone that can expand your offerings to the client.
