Pricing Drone Services for Realtors

Let’s face it, pricing your services can be really hard. What if you price yourself too high and lose the job? What if you price yourself too low and end up resenting having to do so much work for not enough money? While I won’t cover an entire pricing strategy here, I will cover a few few things that have worked in my own drone business in pricing drone services for realtors. These strategies have resulted in getting repeat business from realtors.

Set Yourself Up to do Good Work

Once you’ve found an agent that needs aerial work, make your first job with them an exercise in over-performing. This is your opportunity to sell them on your future work. So take the time to understand what they want and use your first job as a template for future work. The drone market for aerial pictures/videos can be crowded sometimes and earning repeat business is all about providing a better product and service than your competitors.

But remember what I mentioned at the beginning, don’t put yourself in a situation where you are doing WAY too much work for the price that you agreed upon. Instead, think about your first job as the most work you will need to do, with each job after that being less work than the first. Do the following before you even show up (or maybe before you even reach out to a realtor):

Get an idea of what a realtor is looking for.

Does the realtor you have in mind just need a few aerial photographs to add to their listing? Or are they looking for someone that can also shoot all of their listing photography? Does this realtor sell houses that may need aerial videos? Or possibly a walkthrough video that incorporates aerial? It’s your job to be able to provide the solution that your client needs. In the real estate market, it can be difficult to find consistent work if you don’t know what your clients expect.

Put together a shot list.

Do you have a list of all the shots you will need? Maybe even ten standard photographs and several aerial video shots? Make a list and be sure to go through this checklist each and every time you get to a job. For photography, you might just have a list of locations that you would typically shoot on a residential property. For video, you should have a list of shots that you need. Pans, cranes, approach shots, orbits, etc. If you have extra footage, this makes editing easier later.

Get some backing tracks.

There are plenty of sources of backing tracks for free (or very little money). Youtube has a free audio library that you can use. I’ve also used a subscription service called Motion Array that provides various software plugins and has a pretty good selection of backing tracks. Lastly, you can always just buy a few tracks from a service like Pond5. Get about 10 backing tracks that you can use and let your client choose which one they’d prefer.

Find your editing style.

Editing video can be super time consuming but it can also be kind of fun to craft a final product. Find another drone videographer that does good work and see how what shots they use. Also look at any graphic overlays they use to show the property address or the realtor’s contact information. Also, take a look at the types of transitions they use. If you can’t match the quality (or don’t want to), you can always find someone else to do the work. No one says you have to do it all. Use an online marketplace like Fiverr or Upwork to find a competent editor.

So How Much Can I Charge?

So how do you go about pricing drone services for realtors? In my experience, most realtors will not be willing to pay more than about $250 for drone photography/videography. Granted, I’ve not done a lot of high end properties (most of the homes I’ve worked on are in the $150k-$350k range). To be clear though, the price of the property really does matter and not just because the agent will likely be seeing a larger commission when the house sells.

In reality, clients with larger budgets provide you the opportunity to make a better final product. Maybe there are transitions you would not purchase for a $250 video. But if you are working on a home with a $1,000 video budget, you would purchase a transition, a few graphic overlays or even outsource the editing altogether to make sure it looks perfect.

Another thing you can do when pricing drone services for realtors is to gauge the budget on a project by letting the realtor know that you have several different options and want to know what would work best for them. Have three packages ready, one with just photography, one with an edited video and maybe a third with a walkthrough video incorporating aerial. This way you aren’t necessarily pricing yourself out of a job because you’ve likely offered them something that will work.

Combine Services

Another way my drone services company found that we could fetch a higher price for drone work was to pair it with all of the photography/videography the realtor would need. At one point, we were even offering interior, exterior, and aerial pictures along with a short walk through video (that included aerial) for about $350. We could get the footage we needed in about an hour and a half and edit it in another hour after some practice.

Maybe this won’t work for your business model or maybe you could partner with a real estate photographer that doesn’t do aerial work. But providing your client with more options is never a bad thing.

Try Commercial Real Estate Brokers

Finally, I’ve seen the most success with commercial real estate brokers. Normally, they are dealing with WAY more expensive properties and have a better budget for aerial work. Another thing about commercial real estate is that it is often more conducive to aerial work just because of the size and location of the property. If you are looking for other avenues to get drone work check out our article on the best drone uses for business.