Book a drone or real estate shoot

The address, what the shoot is for, the day the images have to be ready, and where they will end up. The address decides the airspace over the property and the length of the drive. What it is for decides the shot list, because aerial property coverage for an agent, a resort's season of marketing and aerial documentation of a build are three different jobs. The date decides which evenings are workable. And where the images end up is written into the quote rather than settled after delivery, so it is worth saying up front: MLS, your own site, social, print or a paid campaign. What a shoot costs sets out what moves the number once those four are known.

A message goes to Pete, not into a queue. What comes back is what the visit would cover and a price for it. If the answer is that the property does not need everything you asked for, you hear that before anything is booked rather than after the gallery arrives. A condo unit with no land of its own gets very little back from an aerial, and that is cheaper to say early than late.

Two things are worth reading before the visit rather than after it: what a drone may legally do over a property, and the hour of work a house wants the evening before. Neither takes long and both change what the photographs are able to show.

Pete flies on a Transport Canada Basic Operations Pilot Certificate and carries $1,000,000 in liability insurance. Both go to a listing brokerage or a homeowner who asks to see them.

Pete is based in the Thornbury area, which puts most of the bay within about an hour and the middle of it within about half an hour. That distance is the reason a shoot can be booked for the light rather than for the calendar: waiting out a grey evening and going back the next one is a scheduling question locally and a second call-out anywhere else. Each of the towns in the regular run has its own page covering what shooting there actually involves.

Work outside that stretch is still quoted, with the travel inside the number rather than added to the invoice afterwards. The near corner of Simcoe County is an ordinary local booking; Barrie, Orillia and Midland are an hour or more each way and priced that way. The same split runs the other direction across Grey County, where the valley and the shore are home ground and Owen Sound, Hanover and Durham carry a drive. Send the address either way — the honest answer about whether the drive makes sense is quicker to give than to guess at.