At $185 a listing for rental photos, when does buying a camera make sense for a small manager?

Here is a decision worth working through as a scenario. A manager runs 22 doors for three owners and shoots every unit that turns. The photographer charges $185 for a standard set, about 25 images, delivered next day. In a year with 14 turns that is roughly $2,600 in photo spend, all of it billed back to owners as a marketing line. Then one owner pushes back on the invoice. His argument is that the leasing coordinator already walks the unit with a phone for the move-out condition report, so why pay someone else to walk it again with a nicer camera. What the manager has: a photographer who is reliable, shows up within two days of a request, and units that lease faster than they did with phone photos. The second part is hard to prove cleanly. Say average days on market went from about 21 to about 13 over the same stretch, but pricing also changed and listings started going up before the unit was fully vacant. What is unsure: a used body plus a wide lens and a tripod looks like $1,400 to $1,800, which pays for itself in ten turns if the only cost is the gear. That is the part to distrust. The coordinator makes about $24 an hour and nobody has measured how long editing actually takes. The decision is whether to keep the outside photographer for all 22 doors, keep him for the two nicer buildings and go in-house on the older stock, or buy the gear and see what happens. The split looks tempting, but the owner who complained owns the older stock, so that is the one where the experiment runs on someone else's vacancy. How would the room weigh it?