The aerial package outsold the 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 was a new word to me until halfway through this thread. It's a lot 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 can't 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 are usually good to somewhere in the range of a tenth of a foot vertical to half a foot depending on ground control, and if he flew it with no ground control points and just the drone's own GPS, the absolute vertical could be off by feet. Relative shape stays fine, which is all you need to see a swale.

So the marketing use is legitimate. 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? Because the number I keep tripping over is $1,850 against a sale that grossed you north of half a million. That's a rounding error at your size. At three acres and a $95k sale price I don't think I can hand anyone eighteen hundred dollars for pictures.

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

I'll be the counterweight. I paid $525 for aerial on a six unit in a dense older neighborhood last year and it did nothing. The drone shot showed my roof, the neighbor's roof, and a parking lot. Buyers for small multifamily want the rent roll and the mechanicals. I've stopped ordering it below about twelve units unless there's something to actually look at.

Quarry's asset is the reason it worked. 31 acres has scale to show. My building doesn't.

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.

I want to be careful about what the 41 days is evidence of.

You have 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 you also have 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 I'd actually credit is narrower and I think it's real. You converted an unknown into a disclosed known before the buyer's consultant found it, and disclosed knowns get priced once instead of twice. The mechanism doesn't depend on the drone. It depends on you 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 gotten you the same disclosure for maybe 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 I'd repeat.

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.

Halyard, five years in on the service side and I'll give you the shape of it.

That $1,850 is fair, slightly under what I'd quote for the same scope. The mapping mission is the reason. A 31 acre grid at the overlap you need for decent photogrammetry is maybe 35 to 50 minutes of flight across two or three batteries, then the processing sits on a machine for a few hours, then somebody has to look at the output and catch the bad stitch. That's a half day of attention after the site visit.

Straight listing video on a suburban house I'll do for $225 to $350 depending on drive time and I'm not proud of it. The mapping and inspection work is where the hours actually price properly. If you build your business on $250 listing flyovers you're competing with every person who got a drone for Christmas.

Cost side: airframe, spare batteries, the processing software subscription, and insurance. Then drive time, which is the thing that really kills you. It's the cost that eats your day and nobody puts on the invoice.

Thatch, what are you actually paying for processing software? I've been pricing this out and the range I'm seeing is enormous, from something like fifty a month to four figures a year depending on whether you want the survey-grade outputs. If I'm only ever doing marketing orthos I don't think I need the expensive tier, but I can't tell whether that's true or whether I'll hit a wall the first time a client asks for something exportable.

Different use for the same equipment. I manage about 340 doors across scattered small properties and I have a pilot on retainer at $400 a month for up to six site visits. He flies roofs after wind events. It's changed my capital planning more than my marketing, because I now know which roofs are three years out instead of finding out when a tenant calls about a ceiling stain.

Quarry's post is the marketing case. There's a whole other demand base in condition monitoring and it's less tied to whether anybody's listing anything.

Trellis, the retainer is the model. I run four people and the thing that made the drone side survive was 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 I might not bill. Two of my scheduled flights last month died on wind above the ceiling I'll fly in, and clients do not consider wind to be my problem. We build one reschedule into the price now and 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 I've looked at 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 I will.

Quarry, who owns the footage? On most one-page drone contracts I've read the pilot retains copyright and grants you a license, and the license is often narrower than people assume. It'll cover marketing the listing. It may not cover you handing the orthomosaic to a buyer as part of a diligence package, which is exactly what you did. I've seen a pilot come back on that after the fact.

Second thing. Did you see a certificate of insurance? Hull coverage on the aircraft protects him. Liability with you named protects you if he puts it through a neighbor's window, and the sublimit on some of the cheap annual policies is low enough to be decorative.

Third, and this one varies by state, in a handful of states aerial imagery used to represent property boundaries can bump into surveying practice rules. Your "property line overlays" on four stills are the kind of deliverable that gets a letter. Ask a licensed surveyor in your state what's allowed there, because I can't tell you and neither can anyone else here.

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's exactly what I use it for and I'd never claim more. The retainer replaced my old practice of sending a maintenance tech up a ladder for a look, which cost me about the same per visit and involved a person on a roof. Anything the flight flags gets a real inspection.

What surprised me is how much of the value is documentation. When an insurer asks what the roof looked like eight months before the storm, I have a dated image set. That's been 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, my liability runs about $900 a year for a million in coverage across two pilots and clients ask for the certificate maybe one time in fifteen. 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 I'm rewriting my price sheet before I open. Two tiers instead of one flat listing rate, mapping priced by acre with a minimum, and a reschedule built in. The thing I was going to do was quote $199 to get volume, and I can see now that gets me 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 go 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's a hobby he'd 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 can't do. Mapping, repeat condition work, 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.

Saving this whole thread. The one thing I'd like written down as a list before I start calling pilots: what do I actually ask for in the scope? So far I've got 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 me. Anything obvious missing from that?