been doing real estate aerial photography for about eight months now with a local agency that found me through a friend. they send me out maybe 2-3 times a week which is great but i started at $175 per property and im starting to wonder if i lowballed myself. each job is usually like 45 minutes on site then probably an hour of culling and editing back home, so call it two hours total and thats before you factor in drive time and wear on the equipment.

the agency seems happy and they've never pushed back on price but they also never offered to pay more lol. i fly a Mini 4 Pro which i know some people look down on for commercial work but the images honestly look great for MLS listings, nobody has ever complained. just trying to get a sense of what other people doing similar work are charging, the range i see online is all over the place and hard to know what's realistic for a mid-size city in the midwest

yeah $175 is on the lower end for sure, not crazy low but you're definitely leaving money on the table if the agency is happy and hasn't flinched. standard advice is to raise rates with new clients while keeping existing ones at the old rate for a while, or just tell them at renewal that your rates are going up slightly. most real estate agencies budget for this stuff and $200-225 isn't going to make them look elsewhere if your work is reliable and consistent.

also the Mini 4 Pro thing ? dont let anyone talk you out of it if it works. half the "you need a Mavic 3 Pro" crowd are just gear nerds, for standard real estate MLS photos the listing agent genuinely cannot tell the difference and neithercan the buyers

two things i'd think about ? one is whether you're charging separately for the photos vs video if you do both, some guys bundle it and some dont, unbundling can naturally get you higher total revenue without it feeling like a rate hike. second thing is make sure you have a real contract with this agency even if its informal right now, like something that says turnaround time, deliverable format, who owns the images, all that. found out the hard way that handshake deals get complicated when an agent wants to use your photos for something beyond the original listing