Quoted twelve agents at $225 flat and four said yes. Price or package?

Nine shoots in six weeks from twelve quotes is a 33 percent close rate, which sounds fine to me for cold outreach? I'd want to know how many people you actually quoted versus how many you talked to. Twelve seems small to be drawing conclusions from.

Dropping to $185 to chase the $199 guy puts you underneath someone who's already delivering more. That's a race you lose while working harder.

Read the two agents who came back twice more carefully than the eight who said no. What kind of listings were those? If the repeat business is coming from a price band where $225 is a rounding error on the commission, you have a segment, and the answer is more of those agents rather than a different price. The people quoting you a $199 competitor are telling you they shop on price and will leave you the moment someone does $179.

Your four hours door to door is the number that decides this, and it's mostly not the shoot. 50 to 80 minutes of that is driving, which nobody pays you for and which doesn't get better with a higher price.

Run it two ways. At $225 with four hours a job, one job a day is $225 for a day you can't do anything else with. Two jobs in a day only works if they're close together, because a second drive across the metro eats the gap. So the real question is how many jobs you can physically stack, and stacking depends on geography, not on your rate card.

Which points at where the volume play breaks. At $185 you need roughly 22 percent more jobs for the same money, and those extra jobs come from further out, because you've already taken the close work. So your average drive goes up at the same time your rate goes down. That's how people end up working six days for less than they made at five.

The $295 with video is the only one of your three options that improves the per-job number without needing more jobs. It also adds maybe 20 minutes on site and, if you're honest about learning it, 60 to 90 minutes of editing per job for the first month. So model it at $295 with five and a half hours until you're fast, which is $53 an hour, worse than today, and then at $295 with four and a half hours once you are, which is $65.

The thing that beats all three is booking two shoots in the same zip code on the same morning. Same money, half the driving. That's a scheduling problem and a marketing radius problem, and it's cheaper to solve than learning video under time pressure with two months of runway.

What I'd want to know before picking: of your nine shoots, how many were within fifteen minutes of each other?

@tally's clustering point is the one I'd act on first. It also changes who you market to. Instead of twelve agents scattered across a metro, pick the two or three brokerages that dominate one side of town and go at them until they know your name. Concentration is a risk when it's revenue and an advantage when it's a driving route.

Floor plans are less work than you think, some of the phone-based scanning tools will spit one out from a walkthrough and it's ten extra minutes on site. Might be the cheapest way to match the $199 guy's deliverable without touching your price. Check what the output actually looks like before you promise it though, the auto-generated dimensions can be off enough that an agent will get complaints.

Two months of runway is the real constraint in this post and it's the one making the price question feel urgent. A pricing experiment needs eight to ten weeks to read, which is exactly the time you have, so whatever you choose you'll be deciding on incomplete data with rent due. That argues for the change that doesn't require learning a new skill. Get the editing time down, book tighter, hold at $225.