so this is kind of embarrassing but a local real estate agent reached out to me after seeing some footage i posted on instagram and she wants photos and video for a listing. ive been flying for about a year and a half, got my part 107 a few months ago, and ive done plenty of personal stuff but never charged anyone for anything.

she asked me what my rates were and i just kind of panicked and said ill send her a quote and then spent the last three days staring at google trying to figure out what to charge. ive seen everything from like $150 to $800 for real estate shoots depending on who you ask and i genuinely cant tell whats reasonable for my market. im in a mid-size city in the midwest, not a huge market but not tiny either.

the property is a 4 bedroom house, probably a 2-3 hour job including travel, editing the photos, and putting together a short video. do i just lowball it to get the job and build a portfolio or is that a bad idea long term? any advice from people who actually do this would be really helpful

dont lowball yourself, seriously. i made that mistake when i started doing real estate work and it is so hard to raise your rates later with the same clients. they get used to paying a certain amount and then when you try to charge what youre actually worth they get offended like you did something wrong.

for a standard real estate shoot in a mid-size market i'd say somewhere in the $250-$350 range for photos plus a short highlight reel is pretty normal. if she wants a longer edited video with music and titles and all that bump it up. also factor in your editing time ? thats where most people underprice because they only think about the time in the field. a 90 second real estate video can take 3-4 hours to edit properly if you're doing it right. send her a clear breakdown of what she gets so theres no confusion later, learned that the hard way too.

i'm kind of in the same boat honestly so following this thread. one thing i did hear is that you should look up what local competitors are charging ? some of them have pricing right on their website. took me like 20 minutes to find 4 or 5 drone photographers in my area and get a rough sense of the range. might be worth doing that before you send the quote