Weighing a $4,500 a month unlimited shoots exclusive against per listing pricing

At 31 listings you're at $145 each. At 45 you're at $100. At 20 you're at $225 and it's the best deal you've ever been offered. So the whole thing is a bet on their listing count, and they know their listing count far better than you do. Ask them for the monthly listing volume for the last 24 months. If they won't give you it, that tells you which direction they expect the number to move.

Dumb question maybe, but does the $4,500 come from the brokerage or from the agents? Because if the brokerage is fronting it and billing agents back, you get paid whether an agent complains or not. If it's a pass-through where each agent authorizes their own listing, you'll be chasing thirty-four people.

@jessreyes12 that isn't a naive question, it's the first one worth asking. Who signs and who pays are different questions, and they're both answered somewhere in the contract.

This is the same shape as a general contractor being offered a cost-plus deal with no cap. The word unlimited never protects the person doing the work. Every version of this in construction ends with a scope conversation in month four, and the person who wanted the predictable number is the one who loses. Counter with a band. $4,500 covers up to 32 listings, anything from 33 to 40 bills at $120, anything past 40 at $150, and reserve the right to schedule it within five business days instead of two. That reads as reasonable to a broker and it caps the downside.

The exclusivity is the part worth pushing on hardest. Losing two good clients permanently for a one year deal is asymmetric. If the deal ends after twelve months, those clients have found someone else and the operator is starting from zero in the zips where they already knew every street.

The hire-an-editor line is the part I keep snagging on. That solves the wrong hour. The editing is the part you can do at 10pm in your kitchen. The 3.5 hours door to door includes driving and shooting, and an editor doesn't touch either of those.

@kevin_lombard is half right. Editing on a package with a drone and a scan is more than people think, and if it's 75 minutes of the 3.5 hours, taking that out gets to 2.25 hours per listing, and suddenly $145 a listing is $64 an hour minus what an editor is paid. At $18 an hour for someone competent that's $22 a listing, so call it $55 an hour net. That's better than the number in the post and it's the only path where a deal like this works.

Put @renee_dubois's version on paper, because it changes the answer. Current: 12.5 shoots at $260 is $3,250, 34 hours, or $95 an hour at 2.75 hours per shoot. If the actual month runs 55 hours, there's 20 hours in there that are quoting, scheduling, and invoicing. That's the real comparison: $3,300 over 55 hours is $60 an hour. Deal at 31 listings with an editor: 31 times 2.25 is 70 hours of shooting time, plus maybe 5 hours of scheduling instead of 20 because there's one client. So 75 hours for $4,500 minus $680 of editing labor, call it $3,820, or $51 an hour. That's 75 hours instead of 55 for $520 more, at a lower hourly rate. That's the deal at the midpoint estimate. At 40 listings it gets worse, at 25 it gets better.

@hannah_west29 nothing's wrong with them except you're pricing his current business as if it scales, and it doesn't. He's at 12.5 a month after eight months. Getting to 20 on his own means twice the quoting hours and he's already spending 20 a month on it. The brokerage deal is a way to skip two years of sales work. Whether that's worth $9 an hour is the actual question.

The thing to worry about at scale is what happens when one agent hates their photos. With 34 agents you will get a reshoot request maybe twice a month, and under a flat fee those are free. Write the reshoot policy into the agreement, one free reshoot per listing for a defined reason, everything else billable.

Also worth defining what counts as a listing. A $180k condo and a $2.4m house on five acres are the same line item in their count and wildly different days for you. If the package includes drone on the acreage, that's an hour of flying and a permission conversation you don't have on the condo.

@diane_kowalski's point plus a tier is probably the whole counter. Flat fee up to 2,800 square feet, surcharge above, drone included only where it is usable. Boring, but it holds up in month nine.

Everyone's negotiating the contract and nobody's asked what happens when you're sick. 31 listings a month with a two day turnaround is a full time obligation on one person's body. You break an ankle in week two and you're in breach. Under your current setup you just tell four agents you're out for a week. Whatever you sign needs a subcontracting right so you can hand work to another shooter without asking permission.

I'd take it for a year with @gregpowell66's band and @omar_haddad's sub clause, and I'd spend that year hiring and training a second shooter rather than an editor. The value of this deal isn't the $4,500. It's that it lets you build a two-person operation with guaranteed base load, which nobody can do from a standing start. Just go in knowing you're buying a year of runway, not a good hourly rate.

The concentration is the thing I'd sit with. One client at 58 percent of revenue, with your two best independent clients contractually removed. If that brokerage merges, changes managing broker, or decides to bring media in house next January, you lose more than half your income and the relationships you'd have fallen back on. Price that. A one year term with a 90 day out for them and a 90 day out for you is not symmetric when they're your whole book.

Read the exclusivity language closely and get someone licensed in your state to look at the whole agreement before you sign, especially anything that survives termination. The clauses worth having rewritten: whether the geographic restriction continues after the term ends and for how long, whether it binds you personally or binds your company, and whether the brokerage or the individual agents own the delivered images and the scan hosting. If the license to the images is silent, you and they will each assume you own them, and you will find out during a dispute. On the survival point specifically, how far a court will enforce a post term restriction on a service provider varies a lot by state, so that is a question for a local attorney rather than for this thread. Get the answer before the end of next week, which means calling one tomorrow.