How to Build a Real Estate Marketing Business that Includes Drones
BY Zacc Dukowitz
29 January 2023What does it take to build a real estate marketing business that includes drone services, from marketing to pricing to building out the skill sets required?
That’s the focus of this post, and we turn to our friends at Real Tour Vision (RTV) for a little help.
Since Jay Stringham and Jason LaVenture of Real Tour Vision are the experts when it comes to real estate marketing, we’re going to let them take away.
Check out this awesome, in-depth video Jason shot to answer common questions (I’ve listed out the highlights below the video, with links so you can skip to the sections of most interest to you):
Skip around in the video to find answers to your questions
- How should I price my real estate marketing work?
- Branding, and how to leverage and grow your WOM (Word of Mouth) reach
- How to find potential customers
- How to build packages
- What is a Macro-SEO site, and how do real estate marketers use them?
- Zillow certification
- Virtual staging
- Single property websites
- Other extras for upsells (green ups and more)
Pricing Advice
Jay Stringham also wrote up some advice to address pricing, which lays out a concrete process you can follow for deciding how much to charge per job.
We’d recommend paying close attention to the last sentence in what Jay wrote—sometimes less work can lead to more money if you’re confident in your worth, and decide not to haggle with those who don’t want to pay for quality work.
Here’s Jay’s advice:
First you want to figure out what your costs of doing business are, including reasonable gear purchases, marketing budget, etc. That can be done weekly or monthly, but in the end you will want to multiply it out so you have a ball park on the year. Then you want to come up with a reasonable idea of what you would like to make in a year. Add those two numbers together.
Determine how many days you can realistically work in a given week. Divide the total of expenses plus preferred salary by the number of days you want to work in a year, taking into consideration holidays, vacations etc..
That will determine how much you will need to make on a daily basis. Then you will want to take the amount of daily income you will require to meet your expenses and salary and divide by a realistic number of jobs you can complete in a given day. You will now have an idea of what you will need to charge per shoot to meet your needs.
You will want to determine if that number is realistic given the market, and adjust expenses and salary accordingly. There will inevitably be people who will want to try to talk you down in price, but you will have a very reasonable argument to present to them on why you charge what you do, and convince them that the service you are offering is worth it.
Be aware of what your competition is charging and what their quality is, so you can present facts to as to why a potential client should hire you over your competition. At the end of the day, the potential clients who refuse to pay reasonable prices are often the most difficult to work with. You may find yourself in a situation where you are able to make the same amount of money or more doing less work and dealing with less hassles by eliminating clients who try to lowball your services.
