LossReal Estate Photography / Video / 3D

Fixed price across 22 listings put me $6,800 behind on labor

I priced a three-format package off a spreadsheet last fall and ran it for a quarter before I looked at the actuals properly. Posting the numbers because the failure is boring and repeatable.

The package: stills, a 60 to 90 second vertical walkthrough video, and a 3D scan. Flat $475 per property up to 2,500 square feet, $575 above that. I had one brokerage feeding me most of the volume, plus a handful of one-off sellers.

My assumed cost per job: 1.9 hours on site, 2.5 hours post, editor at $28 an hour for the video, my own time unpriced at first and then charged internally at $45. Call it $260 of labor against $475. That looked like a business.

Actuals across 22 completed jobs:

On site averaged 2.6 hours, not 1.9. The scan is what did it. Every closet door, every mirror, every occupied bedroom that needed 10 minutes of tidying before I'd put it in a dollhouse view.

Post averaged 5.1 hours, not 2.5. Video was 3.4 of that. My editor's first pass never matched what the agents wanted and revisions weren't capped, so the median job had 1.8 rounds and two jobs had five.

Blended labor cost landed at $431 per job against $451 average revenue. Add scan subscription, drive, and insurance allocated per job and I was at roughly negative $310 per property. Across 22 that's about $6,800 down, and the quarter felt busy the entire time, which is the part that annoys me.

The part I got most wrong: I never renegotiated mid-quarter because 16 of the 22 came from one brokerage and I didn't want to test whether they'd stay at $600. So I ate it and called it market entry.

What I'd do differently. Meter the video separately from the stills and the scan, because it's the only line that behaves like a custom job. Cap revisions at one round in writing and price the second. And time the first three jobs of any new package before I quote the fourth.

Where I'm less sure: whether the scan belongs in the same visit at all, or whether it should be a separate trip priced on its own.

Answer

1bmoreno23AB1B

I'm the wrong person to talk technique so I'll stay on the numbers, because there's a sequencing problem in the post that I think matters more than either the video hours or the scan question.

You didn't discover the 5.1 hours until after the quarter. Everything else follows from that. If you'd tracked post time per job from job one, you'd have seen the gap by job three, and the decision in front of you would have been a small one. Instead you got to the end holding a $6,800 number and a client relationship where a price change now looks like you failing rather than you learning.

Which is the second problem, and it's the one I'd fix first. 16 of 22 jobs from one brokerage means you had no ability to test the price. Repricing them isn't a negotiation, it's a threat to your whole quarter, so of course you didn't do it. Anyone at 70 percent concentration eats the loss, which is what you did.

So, the two things I'd take from your post if I were setting this up: write down actual post hours on every job starting with the first one, and get the biggest client under half of the volume before you have to have a hard conversation with them.

The revision cap and the metered video both sound right to me. They just don't help if you find out in April what you needed to know in January, and they don't help if you're too dependent to use them.

5 replies

1mikeoconnell7SP2APRO6

The 3.4 hours of video post per job is the whole loss and I don't think the fix is metering it. I'd want to know what the editor was actually doing for 3.4 hours on a 75 second vertical.

When I've watched people do this, the time goes into decisions rather than work. No shot list, so the editor is choosing which of 40 clips tell the story, and the agent is choosing differently, and that's your 1.8 rounds. If you shoot to a fixed sequence, same six moves every property, the edit becomes assembly and it can land under an hour. You lose some flair. At $475 a job you weren't being paid for flair.

Did you give the editor a template or a folder of clips?

3nataliehsuSO1BPRO7

ledger, on your open question about the scan being a separate trip: I'd say no, and the reason is the tidying. If you go back a second day the place has moved. Toys are out, blinds are different, and now your stills and your scan disagree with each other, which agents do notice.

What I'd separate is the prep. The 10 minutes per occupied bedroom isn't your job and it isn't in your $475. Send a one page prep sheet the day before and charge a stated fee if you arrive and the place isn't ready. Whether people pay it is another matter, but at least you'd know what the occupied jobs cost you compared to the vacant ones. Did you split that out? I'd bet the vacant ones were near breakeven and the occupied ones were the entire hole.

1aliyah_bAU2APRO6

Question about the spreadsheet, since I'm building one right now for a different reason and making the same kind of guess.

Where did 2.5 hours of post come from? Was that a number you'd measured on stills-only jobs and then extended to a package with two formats you hadn't done at volume yet? Because that's what it reads like, and it would explain why the miss is 2.6 hours rather than 20 minutes. A miss that size usually means the estimate came from a different job.

1renee_dubois Get yours

Smaller scale but same shape. I own small multifamily and I paid a photographer $390 for stills plus a scan on a four unit I was refinancing, mostly because I wanted the scan for my own records on unit conditions.

He was on site three hours because two tenants were home and one of them followed him from room to room. He didn't charge me more. I found out later he told a friend of mine he stopped taking occupied buildings after that, which is a real answer even if it's not the one you want.

ledger, the thing I'd push back on is calling it market entry. You had 22 data points and you had them by job four. The cost of not repricing wasn't the $6,800, it was that the brokerage now has a $451 anchor in its head.