Fly Your Own Drone or Hire a Pro? A Guide for Listing Agents

Plenty of agents own a drone, and plenty more have thought about buying one. The question comes up often enough that it deserves a straight answer. You can fly your own listing aerials. Whether you should depends on the certificate, the airspace and how much of your week the work takes.

What flying your own requires

Marketing a listing is commercial use, so the recreational rules don’t cover it. In practice that means:

• An FAA Part 107 remote pilot certificate, which you earn by passing the aeronautical knowledge test at an FAA-approved testing center, with a recurrent online course every 24 months.
• A registered aircraft (any drone flown under Part 107 has to be registered, whatever it weighs) that complies with Remote ID.
• Airspace authorization through LAANC whenever the address is in controlled airspace. Where the FAA grid shows zero, it’s a manual request that can take weeks.
• A habit of checking the weather and the grid before every job, not just the first.

Insurance isn’t an FAA requirement, but some brokerages and property managers want proof before anyone flies over their property. Sort that out before you take a listing up, not after.

What it costs besides money

The flight is short. The rest isn’t. You drive to the property, set up, fly, drive back, cull the files and edit them, and every step competes with showings and paperwork. An agent doing this for one or two listings a month is spending real hours on it. Hiring out turns that into one booking.

The other cost is consistency. A buyer sees your aerials next to your ground photos, and a hurried aerial in flat light on a hazy afternoon undercuts a good photo set.

If you fly your own, make it count

Shoot at several heights instead of settling on the first frame, because you won’t know which one sings until you see them side by side. Put a leading line in the frame, like a driveway or a fence, so the eye lands on the house. Orbit the property once for video and keep the move slow. Before every launch, run the short list: airspace and LAANC, charged batteries, clean props, where the sun sits, and a walk of the yard to find the hose, the trash cans and the car you’d want gone. Finish with one consistent edit across the set. What makes a listing aerial work in the first place, from altitude to the shot list, is in our aerial photography guide.

Mistakes agents make flying their own

• Launching from the street or a public park without anyone’s permission. Launch from the subject property.
• Letting the aircraft out of sight. Keep it in your line of sight the whole flight.
• Flying over the neighbor’s yard or over people, which raises privacy and safety problems fast.
• Skipping the airspace check on a “quiet” street, then finding out the address sits near an airport.
• Flying too high. Past a couple hundred feet the house shrinks and the frame stops selling anything.
• Delivering a gallery with the things that should have been moved still in the picture.

When hiring it out makes sense

• The property is acreage, waterfront or a large lot, where framing and the order of passes matter most.
• The address is in or near controlled airspace, and you don’t want to be the one waiting on a manual FAA request.
• You want video as well as stills, or aerials that match the ground exterior shots from the same visit.
• You have several listings a month and the hours add up.

Flying your own makes more sense on a small, simple property in uncontrolled airspace, when you already hold the certificate and enjoy the work.

If you go the hiring route, our guide to hiring a drone operator near you covers what to check. We fly Greenville, Spartanburg and Anderson properties too, and the Upstate drone guide shows how. To see what a drone shoot includes, look at our packages.

Want it handled? Beyond All Media does the flying and the editing. Call our South Carolina line at (864) 714-0724 or Richmond at (804) 913-3013.