Quoted $1,400 for an orthomosaic on 240 acres, is that output any use to me in a workout?

Question

I hold a paper position on a rural parcel, roughly 240 acres, and the borrower has stopped responding. I need to know what's physically out there before I decide anything, and I can't get comfortable from satellite tiles that look a couple of years stale.

A drone operator quoted me $1,400 for what he called an orthomosaic plus contour lines, and $450 for a marketing video on top of it. He said the mapping product gives acreage and boundary lines and that his software reports accuracy in centimeters.

That last part is where I get stuck. If the deliverable tells me acreage and boundaries, what am I paying a surveyor for? And is $1,400 a reasonable number at that size, or is he pricing the software rather than the flight? I'd rather ask before I sign a scope I don't understand.

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 I've looked at, and the license belongs to a land surveyor, not a drone pilot. What you're describing would be an aerial image with a GIS overlay on it. Useful for your purposes, useless in a dispute. If there's 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 we buy that product for volumes and change over time. Cut and fill on a pad, how much material is in a stockpile, whether the pond holds water in August. For vellum's situation it answers questions like is there a new road cut across the middle, has somebody parked forty trailers on it, how much of the 240 is standing timber versus scrub, is there a slope that makes half of it undevelopable.

On the centimeter claim, ask him whether he's 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're talking about a longer day, and that's part of why the number isn't $450.

mikeoconnell7 · Answer

$1,400 on 240 acres works out to just under $6 an acre, which is in the range I've seen quoted for mapping missions once you're 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 aren't cheap. The $450 video is a separate product with a separate flight profile, so don't expect a discount for combining them beyond the drive.

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.

Quoted $1,400 for an orthomosaic on 240 acres, is that output any use to me in a workout?

6 replies