$4,500 a month for unlimited shoots. Three days trying to make it not a trap.

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.

@compass that isn't a dumb question, it's the first one I'd ask. Who signs and who pays are different questions and they're both in the contract somewhere.

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 I've seen in construction ended with a scope conversation in month four, and the person who wanted the predictable number was the one who lost.

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 you reserve the right to schedule it within five business days instead of two. That reads as reasonable to a broker and it caps your downside.

The exclusivity is the part I'd push 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 you're starting from zero in the zips where you already know 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.

@juniper 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 you to 2.25 hours per listing and suddenly $145 a listing is $64 an hour minus what you pay the editor. 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 this deal works.

Let me put @cairn's version on paper because it changes the answer.

Current: 12.5 shoots at $260 = $3,250, 34 hours, $95 an hour if I use 2.75 hours per shoot. Kestrel said 55 hours a month though, so there's 20 hours in there that are quoting, scheduling, and invoicing. That's the real comparison. $3,300 over 55 hours is $60.

Deal at 31 listings with an editor: 31 x 2.25 = 70 hours of your time, plus maybe 5 hours of scheduling instead of 20 because one client. So 75 hours for $4,500 minus $680 of editing labor, call it $3,820, or $51 an hour.

So you'd work 75 hours instead of 55 and make $520 more, at a lower rate. That's the deal at their midpoint estimate. At 40 listings it gets worse, at 25 it gets better. What's wrong with those numbers?

@ledger 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 that would worry me at scale is what happens when one agent hates their photos. With 34 agents you'll get a reshoot request maybe twice a month, and under 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.

@arbor'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's 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 @girder's band and @harrow'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 I'd want rewritten: whether the geographic restriction continues after the term ends and for how long, whether it binds you 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'll 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's 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.