How an aerial photography package outperformed a broker's flyer on 31 acres

The contour piece is the interesting bit and I think you're underselling it. I've held raw ground for eleven years and the single most expensive thing that happens to me is a buyer's engineer finding something in week five that I could have found in week zero for six hundred dollars. Your $600 civil review off the photogrammetry is the cheapest line item in the whole post.

Question though. Did anybody push back on the accuracy of the contours? Two foot intervals off drone photogrammetry are not the same thing as a surveyed topo and I'd expect a sharp buyer to say so.

Orthomosaic is worth defining for anyone following this thread. It is a set of overlapping aerial photos stitched into one flat image with the lens distortion corrected out, so distances on the image match distances on the ground. A normal aerial photo is taken from an angle and you cannot measure off it reliably. Quarry, was the $800 for that a separate flight or the same trip?

Orchard is right to poke at it. Photogrammetry contours off a drone usually land somewhere between a tenth of a foot and half a foot vertical depending on ground control, and a flight with no ground control points relying on the drone's own GPS can be off by feet in absolute vertical. Relative shape holds up, which is all anyone needs to read a swale. So the marketing use is legitimate on its own terms. Nobody should be designing a detention basin off it. Quarry, did the pilot set any ground control, or was it a straight autonomous grid?

What does this look like if the parcel is 3 acres instead of 31? The number that keeps getting skipped is $1,850 against a sale that grossed north of half a million, which is a rounding error at that size. At three acres and a $95k sale price, eighteen hundred dollars for pictures is very hard to justify.

Genuine question, did the video itself do anything measurable or was it all the map?

I will be the counterweight. Take a six unit in a dense older neighborhood. Five hundred and change of aerial there buys a picture of the subject roof, the neighbor's roof and a parking lot, and it moves nothing. Buyers for small multifamily want the rent roll and the mechanicals. Below about twelve units it is rarely worth ordering unless there is something on the site worth looking at. Quarry's asset is the reason it worked. 31 acres has scale to show. A six unit on a tight block does not.

Marlow, on land the video isn't for buyers who already know the parcel. It's for the ones three states away deciding whether to get on a plane. That's the whole function.

Quarry, how many of your four touring groups were out of market?

What is LAANC? I've read this thread twice and I can tell it's a permission thing but I don't understand who's giving the permission.

Worth being careful about what the 41 days is evidence of. There is one listing attempt in 2023 that died at day 60 on a drainage finding and one in 2025 that contracted at day 41 with the drainage disclosed up front. Between those two there is also a different market, a different price, and presumably a different broker conversation. The aerial package is one of at least four things that changed. The part worth crediting is narrower and it is real. An unknown got converted into a disclosed known before the buyer's consultant found it, and disclosed knowns get priced once instead of twice. The mechanism does not depend on the drone. It depends on having a cheap way to characterize the ground before listing. The drone was the cheap way. A walking survey with a rod and level would have produced the same disclosure for roughly the same money on 31 acres. So the honest claim is that $800 of photogrammetry substituted for a more expensive pre-listing topo, and the $600 civil review is what turned data into a sentence a buyer could act on. That part is repeatable.

I'm three weeks out from sitting the Part 107 knowledge test and this thread is the most useful pricing data I've seen. Everyone online either quotes $150 for a listing or won't say.

Quarry's pilot got $1,850 for what sounds like one flight day plus edit time plus a mapping process. What does the day actually cost him to deliver? I have no idea what I should be charging and I'd rather not find out by underquoting twenty jobs.

On the pricing question, here's the shape of it from the service side. $1,850 for a full aerial package on a 31 acre parcel is fair, slightly under what a lot of operators would quote for the same scope. The mapping mission is the reason. A 31 acre grid at the overlap needed for decent photogrammetry runs roughly 35 to 50 minutes of flight across two or three batteries, then processing sits on a machine for a few hours, then someone has to review the output and catch a bad stitch. That's close to half a day of attention after the site visit. A straight listing video on a suburban house typically runs $225 to $350 depending on drive time, and that end of the market is crowded. Mapping and inspection work is where the hours actually price properly. A business built on cheap listing flyovers ends up competing with anyone who got a drone for Christmas. On the cost side: airframe, spare batteries, the processing software subscription, and insurance, plus drive time, which is the line that really eats the day and rarely makes it onto an invoice.

Thatch, what does the processing software actually cost month to month? The range out there is enormous, from something like fifty a month to four figures a year depending on whether survey-grade outputs are needed. For marketing orthos alone, the expensive tier probably isn't necessary, but it's hard to tell whether that holds until a client asks for something exportable.

A different use case for the same equipment worth naming: a landlord managing a scattered portfolio can keep a drone pilot on retainer, in the range of $400 a month for a handful of site visits, to fly roofs after wind events. That kind of arrangement often changes capital planning more than marketing, because it flags which roofs are a few years out instead of finding out when a tenant calls about a ceiling stain. The original post here is the marketing case. There's a whole separate demand base in condition monitoring, and it isn't tied to whether anyone is listing anything.

Trellis, the retainer is the model. A small drone crew survives on recurring work, because project work on listings is entirely at the mercy of somebody else's calendar and the weather. Quarry lost three scheduled dates. On a per-project fee that's three mobilizations that might not bill. Scheduled flights routinely die on wind above a safe ceiling, and clients do not consider wind to be the pilot's problem. Building one reschedule into the price is standard now, with a charge for the second.

Can I just do this myself? I've got a Mini and the property I'm chasing is 8 acres. Half my research budget is spent on things I later realize I could have done in an afternoon.

Pike, if you're flying your own property for your own use the rules are different from flying for hire, and the line between those two is exactly the thing that trips people. Any flight in furtherance of a business generally puts you under the commercial rules, which means the remote pilot certificate. Confirm the current requirements directly with the FAA rather than with me or with a forum, because the operating rules do get amended.

Separate from that, a Mini in decent light will give you a nice video. It will not give you a usable orthomosaic on 8 acres unless you know what overlap to set and you're willing to babysit the processing. That's the part that's actually skill.

Sextant already said the thing I'd say about attribution, so I'll add the one number that would settle it. Quarry, what did the four touring groups cost you to generate? If the aerial package is doing work, it should show up as tours per week of marketing, not as days to contract. Days to contract is downstream of price, and you priced to sell at $18,300 against a $16,000 floor, which is not an aggressive ask on transitional ground next to a sewer line that's 900 feet away. I think the $600 civil review is the highest-return line in the post and it isn't a drone expense at all.

Trellis, on the roof flights, what's your pilot actually catching? I've been on roofs for nineteen years and I can tell you what a camera at 40 feet misses. It misses soft decking, which you only find by stepping on it. It misses fastener backout on a metal roof unless he's coming down to twelve feet with a good lens. It misses anything under a ponded area.

What it does catch is missing shingles, lifted flashing, and the general condition question of whether somebody needs to go up there. That's worth $400 a month if you're honest about it being a triage tool.

Reading this from the paper side and mostly out of my depth, but the disclosed-known point from sextant applies to notes too. Everything eventually gets repriced when diligence turns up something the seller had and didn't say.

Quarry, how did you find this pilot originally? Every listing agent in my area has one "my drone guy" and the quality range in what I see posted is enormous. I can't tell from a finished video whether somebody can run a mapping mission or whether they just know how to make a hero shot.

Nobody has asked about the paperwork so it's worth raising. On most one page drone contracts, the pilot retains copyright and grants a license, and that license is often narrower than people assume. It typically covers marketing a listing. It may not cover handing an orthomosaic to a buyer as part of a diligence package, which is a common way sellers end up using the footage. Pilots have come back on that after the fact. Second, a certificate of insurance matters. Hull coverage on the aircraft protects the pilot. Liability coverage naming the property owner protects them if the aircraft goes through a neighbor's window, and the sublimit on some cheap annual policies is low enough to be effectively decorative. Third, and this varies by state, aerial imagery used to represent property boundaries can bump into surveying practice rules in some jurisdictions. Property line overlays on still images are the kind of deliverable that draws a letter from a licensed surveyor's board. Checking with a licensed surveyor in the relevant state before that imagery goes into a diligence package is the safer order of operations.

Fathom's license point is the one I'd never have thought of. So the practical version is that if you want to redistribute the deliverable to buyers, lenders, or a listing service, that has to be written into the scope before the flight rather than assumed. Does anyone actually get that in writing, or is it one of those things that only surfaces when there's money on the table?

Solder, that is exactly the right scope for it, and nobody should claim more. For an operator, a drone retainer typically replaces the old practice of sending a maintenance tech up a ladder for a look, which costs about the same per visit and puts a person on a roof. Anything the flight flags still gets a real inspection. The part that surprises most owners is how much of the value is documentation. When an insurer asks what the roof looked like eight months before the storm, a dated image set answers the question. That tends to be worth more than the diagnosis.

Trellis, the dated image set is the answer I didn't expect and it's the best argument in the thread. Pre-loss condition is the fight in every storm claim I've watched. I might go get the certificate myself just for my own jobs.

On fathom's insurance point, a small drone operation with two pilots typically runs liability around $900 a year for a million in coverage, and clients ask for the certificate perhaps once in fifteen engagements. The ones who ask are the commercial and institutional clients, which is also where the fees are better. Draw your own conclusion about which market to chase.

Taking thatch's and cobalt's numbers together, a pilot drafting a price sheet should rewrite it before opening the doors. Two tiers instead of one flat listing rate, with mapping priced by acre against a minimum and a reschedule clause built in. The tempting move is to quote $199 to get volume, and these numbers show exactly where that leads: to the clients who ask about certificates zero times out of fifteen and argue about the invoice anyway.

Still curious about quarry's answer but I'll say what I've settled on in the meantime. I'm going to ask any pilot for a raw ortho from a past job rather than a highlight reel. Anyone can cut a reel. The stitch quality on a real mapping output tells you whether they set the flight up properly.

Booking the knowledge test this week. The thing that decided it isn't the listing work, it's trellis and solder talking about documentation and triage. That demand doesn't disappear when listings slow down, which is the part of the service side I was worried about.

Halyard, one warning before you build the business around it. The certificate is a real barrier and it does keep out some of the noise. It does not keep out the guy with a $900 drone who got his certificate in a weekend and charges $150 because it is a hobby he would like to break even on. That guy will take the listing work in your market and he will be fine at it about seventy percent of the time. You compete on the jobs he cannot do. Mapping and repeat condition work, plus anything where the client needs a certificate of insurance and an invoice with terms. Quarry's job is that kind of job. The suburban hero shot is not.

Worth pinning the scope down before anyone starts calling pilots. So far the list reads: flight date plus one free reschedule, orthomosaic with stated overlap, contour interval, redistribution rights to buyers and lenders in writing, and a certificate of insurance naming the owner. Anything obvious missing from that?