Last reviewed:
Current as of 24 August 2026. Every rule below is linked to the Transport Canada page or the section of the Canadian Aviation Regulations it comes from, checked on that date.
The rest of this page is the detail behind that answer, because "yes" is not much use to an agent who has been asked the question by a nervous seller.
Does a drone pilot need a licence to shoot real estate?
Yes. Any drone between 250 grams and 25 kilograms flown outdoors in Canada has to be registered with Transport Canada and marked with its registration number, and the person flying it has to hold a pilot certificate. There is no hobby exemption that covers work done for a client.
There are two certificates. Basic Operations covers flights in uncontrolled airspace, away from people. Advanced Operations is the one required to fly in controlled airspace or close to people, and it takes a flight review as well as an exam.
Pete holds the Transport Canada Pilot Certificate for Basic Operations and took his drone training with AlteX droneHUB, a school whose real estate course is built around listing work. Basic covers standard residential listing photography around South Georgian Bay. Where a property falls somewhere Basic cannot go, you will hear that when the job is quoted.
The aircraft, the ground kit and the work they get used for are on the drone and aerial photography page.
What are the actual limits on the flight?
Basic operations means all of these at once, in Transport Canada's own terms:
- the drone weighs no more than 25 kg
- it stays where the pilot can always see it
- it stays more than 30 metres (100 feet) horizontally from any person
- it stays in uncontrolled airspace
- it stays more than 5.6 kilometres (3 nautical miles) from the centre of a certified airport
- it stays more than 1.9 kilometres (1 nautical mile) from the centre of a heliport
One more rule applies to every drone flight in the country whatever the category. Nothing goes higher than 400 feet above ground level.
Which of those rules changes a shoot around here?
The 30-metre one, almost every time, and the exact wording of it decides who has to move.
Transport Canada's plain-language summary says 30 metres from any person. The regulation itself is narrower: 30 metres from any person not involved in the operation. That difference is the whole practical question. The agent, the seller and anyone else who is part of the shoot and has been told what is happening do not count against it. The neighbour in their own yard, the dog walker on the sidewalk and the kids on the street do.
On a village lot in Thornbury or a downtown Collingwood block, 30 metres reaches past the property line in every direction. So the flight gets planned around a quiet stretch of the street rather than around the best light, and the aircraft sits further back and uses its telephoto camera rather than flying close. On acreage in Meaford or Creemore the rule rarely comes up at all, because there is nobody within 30 metres to begin with.
This is also the honest reason a drone shoot is sometimes scheduled at an odd hour. It is not a preference. It is the only hour the rule allows.
What about the airport?
Collingwood Regional Airport sits southeast of town in Clearview Township, and there are smaller aerodromes scattered around the region. Distance from them is checked per address, not per town, because two properties a concession apart can fall on opposite sides of the line.
Every flight is planned in NAV CANADA's NAV Drone app first. It shows the airspace over that specific address and any advisories in effect that day. If a property does sit inside a restriction, the answer is not that there are no photos. It is ground-level and elevated coverage instead, and you would hear it at the quoting stage rather than on shoot day.
Do the neighbours have to agree to it?
No, and it helps to separate two things that get merged.
Transport Canada governs the airspace. The property owner controls where the aircraft takes off and lands, which is why the launch point is on the listing property itself. A neighbour controls neither.
What a neighbour is owed is care about what ends up in the frame. Photography done for a client falls under federal privacy law, so shots are composed on the subject property, and identifiable people or a neighbour's private space do not go into a listing gallery. In practice that is a framing decision made in the air, not paperwork done in advance.
Telling the neighbours anyway is usually worth the two minutes. A drone that somebody was expecting draws a wave. A drone nobody was expecting draws a phone call.
What to ask any drone photographer for
Two documents. Anyone working legally has both, and it takes one message to ask.
The Transport Canada pilot certificate. Ask which one it is. Basic and Advanced are not a formality; they set what the pilot may legally do near people and in controlled airspace, and a pilot who cannot tell you which one they hold is telling you something.
Proof of liability insurance, with the amount on it. Pete carries $1,000,000 in liability coverage through a provider the Professional Photographers of Canada recommends to its members. If a listing brokerage asks for a certificate before a shoot, that is a normal request and it should take a day at most to produce.
