Whether a $1,400 orthomosaic quote is any use in a workout on 240 acres

Question

Consider a paper position on a rural parcel, roughly 240 acres, where the borrower has stopped responding. Knowing what's physically out there matters before any decision gets made, and satellite tiles that look a couple of years stale don't answer that. A drone operator quotes $1,400 for an orthomosaic plus contour lines, and $450 for a marketing video on top of it, with the mapping product reportedly giving acreage and boundary lines and accuracy reported in centimeters. That last claim deserves scrutiny. If the deliverable gives acreage and boundaries, what does a surveyor add? And whether $1,400 is reasonable at that size, or whether the number is pricing the software rather than the flight, is worth asking directly before signing a scope that isn't fully understood.

diane_kowalski · Answer

The word doing the damage in that quote is boundaries. An orthomosaic is a stitched, geometrically corrected aerial photo, so it's a very good picture of what's on the ground. It doesn't know where the legal lines are. The operator's software is drawing whatever polygon he traced or whatever parcel layer he imported from the county GIS, and county GIS parcel layers are widely stamped as not survey grade.

nicole_adeyemi · Answer

Following on from arbor, a boundary determination is a licensed act in every state, and the license belongs to a land surveyor. A drone pilot does not hold one. What is being described here is an aerial image with a GIS overlay on it. Useful for your purposes, useless in a dispute. If there is any chance of a title or encroachment fight on this parcel you want a surveyor's stamped product, and you should ask a real estate attorney in that state how it interacts with your remedies.

nataliehsu · Answer

What does the mapping actually get you then, if not the lines? Genuinely asking, I'm trying to understand what a client buys with the $1,400.

gregpowell66 · Answer

Plumb, on the construction side that product gets bought for volumes and change over time. Cut and fill on a pad, how much material sits in a stockpile, whether the pond still holds water in August. For vellum's situation it answers questions like whether there is a new road cut across the middle, whether somebody has parked forty trailers on it, how much of the 240 is standing timber versus scrub, and whether there is a slope that makes half of it undevelopable. On the centimeter claim, ask him whether he is setting ground control points and how many. Photogrammetry without ground control gives you good relative geometry and absolute positioning that can be off by meters vertically. With control on a site that size you are talking about a longer day, and that is part of why the number is not $450.

mikeoconnell7 · Answer

A $1,400 quote on 240 acres works out to just under $6 an acre, which is in the range typically quoted for mapping missions once a parcel is past a hundred acres or so. Flat rate day pricing shows up too, often $1,200 to $2,000 for a mapping day including processing, because the processing time on that many images is real and the software licenses are not cheap. The $450 video is a separate product with a separate flight profile, so do not expect a discount for combining them beyond the shared drive out.

marcus_hale41 · Answer

Before you spend anything, ask who else has to accept this document. If it's only you, an orthomosaic and contours is a genuinely good $1,400. If a servicer, a buyer of the note or a court has to look at it, an unstamped drone deliverable will get set aside and you'll pay for the survey anyway. I've had a diligence item bounce for exactly that reason and the sequencing cost more than the product did.

Also ask him for the deliverable formats in writing. "Contour lines" can mean a PDF you can't measure on.

Whether a $1,400 orthomosaic quote is any use in a workout on 240 acres

6 replies