Six months of drone work: $12,400 and one very close call

9 land parcels in six months is the interesting line, not the 24 listings. Land sellers and land buyers both want to see boundary in relation to what's around it. Have you looked at whether you can add a simple stitched overhead map to that package? It's a different flight pattern and mostly software after that. Around here that pushes a $450 job to $700 and the person paying doesn't blink because they're selling 30 acres.

$12,400 gross over six months, what's your actual hours in that? I'm trying to work out whether this is a real income or a $30 an hour hobby with equipment costs.

Run the sensitivity, @ember, because your mix is doing all the work. Take out the subdivision progress shoots and the land parcels and you have 29 jobs at roughly $215, which is $6,200 over six months. The recurring construction client is 16% of your revenue from one site super who happened to walk past. That's a good outcome and it's also a single relationship. What happens to the six months after this one when that build tops out?

New to all of this. Does the certificate expire or is it once and done?

There's a recurrent training requirement you complete online periodically to keep flying commercially, @rigging, and it's free rather than a paid retest. Confirm the current interval and format on the FAA's own site since the process has changed before.

@ember, the thing I'd flag from the money side is that you spent $2,700 of your own cash and got it back in roughly the first ten jobs. That's a genuinely short payback and it's why this field attracts everybody with a credit card. Your defense isn't the aircraft, it's the 24 hour delivery and the fact that a site super knows your name.

The airspace mistake is the useful part of this post. I would have assumed distance from an airport was the test and it isn't, it's the specific grid block, and heliports at hospitals catch people constantly. Adding that check to the quote step rather than the flight step is such a small change for how much it saved you.

I'm mostly here for the paper side and I understand about half of this, but the $150 clients thing translates perfectly. I've watched a friend price a service low to get started and then spend two years trapped by it. Sounds like the fix is the same everywhere.

Asking the question I'd have been embarrassed to ask out loud. How do you actually get permission to fly over a property you don't own, and does the seller have to be there? I've never understood whether the neighbors have any say.

@compass, from what I've read the airspace above is federally regulated and there's no general requirement to get a neighbor's consent to overfly, but state and local privacy and trespass laws vary a lot and some states have specific drone statutes, so it's worth asking a local attorney if you're operating for money. @ember, do you get a signed authorization from the property owner before each shoot? That's the piece I'd want if a neighbor complained.

Yes, get the signature. A one page shoot authorization from the owner or listing agent, naming the address, the date range and who owns the resulting footage, solves two problems at once. The second one matters more than people expect. If your contract is silent on ownership, you and the agent will eventually disagree about whether she can hand your clip to the next brokerage when she switches, and by then there's nothing to point at. Put a license grant in writing that says what she can use it for and for how long. @ember, at 41 jobs you're past the point where a handshake is fine.