Before I fund a $6k second camera I want to know his shoots per day

Ask him what his service radius is before anything else. Somebody covering one metro at 20 minutes between stops and somebody covering three counties are running completely different businesses at the same price per house.

Two things I'd want on paper. Who owns the camera if he stops shooting, and is there a security interest in the hardware or is this unsecured hope. Then the image licensing, which nobody reads. Most residential shooters license photos to the listing agent for the marketing of that one listing, and the brokerage generally assumes it bought the file outright. Those are different, they collide when the agent changes brokerages, and it matters here because his back catalog is part of what you'd be lending against.

When I book photos for a turnover the only thing I actually care about is whether the images land by the next morning. The shooter who scans a 3D tour and then takes four days to deliver loses me to the one who delivers overnight with worse photos. Ask him what his turnaround is on a day when he's shot three houses, because that's where 15 a week goes wrong.

Run the attach rate. 15 listings a week at $195 is $2,925 base. If a quarter of them take the $250 add-on that's another $940ish, so about $3,900 a week gross before editing costs, mileage, insurance, and the tour hosting plan. A $6,500 camera is a couple of good weeks of gross and about two months of whatever his actual take-home is. If he can't fund that himself out of a year of this, the revenue number is soft somewhere and I'd want the bank statements rather than the verbal.

Paying you back a share of revenue rather than a fixed schedule changes what the document is, and depending on how it's written and who else is in it, it can look like a security. One conversation with a securities attorney in your state settles it. I wouldn't sign the friendly one-pager he's probably imagining.

Genuinely asking, isn't there a phone app that does 3D tours for free now? If buyers can't tell the difference, what's the $6,000 camera buying?

Something about this setup doesn't add up for me. If repayment moves with his shoot volume, it isn't really a note with a fixed payment, is it. It sounds more like buying a slice of his revenue, and I'd want to know what happens in a month with four listings instead of fifteen.

ember, the phone version is fine for a rental and visibly worse on a $600k listing, mostly geometry drift and mushy detail. I looked at buying a capture camera for my own projects and gave up on it. Hiring the tour out at $250 a house means I'd need two dozen houses before owning made sense, and I don't do two dozen houses.

Something I never got around to asking face to face: who keeps paying the monthly hosting for all those tours? If he's carrying 300 old tours on a plan and stops paying it, every one of those links breaks on listings his agents already delivered. That's a recurring cost inside the pitch and it grows with the number of houses he shoots.

Cheapest version of this: he buys the camera on a payment plan or waits two months and buys it outright, and you stay out of it. If the business supports $6,500 of hardware it can save $6,500.

compass's hosting point is the one I'd chase, because it's the only cost in here that compounds while the revenue per house stays flat. And I still haven't seen anyone answer meridian's actual question, which is whether the second camera ever gets used. Unless he's already got a second shooter he's training, it's a spare body for the day the first one fails, and that's worth buying, just not worth borrowing at whatever this ends up costing him.