Losing A Regular Photography Gig

An update: yesterday one of the agents I worked for at this company called me to say that she has insisted that the coordinator continue to assign her listings to me to photograph, provided that I agree, of course. I can’t afford to turn work away, so what I have done is agree with a proviso - any jobs they give me can only be done at 8am or will have to fit in with my plans for any day. They are happy with that, as am I. 
 

The thing about shooting real estate for low amounts is that while it only takes me around 20 minutes to photograph the average home, I need to also factor in travel and editing time. Combined those overheads mean that a typical single appointment can suck up about 2 hours of a day. If a client can only see me at say 11am and they are a 15 minute drive away, that means that I must get in my car at 10.40am, get there, faf around with the client for a few minutes, do the job and then get back home an hour later. The editing, while now streamlined, still takes another 40 minutes or so. If I was shooting 2 or 3 properties a day this would be worth it for me, but for only 1, not so much. That’s why I have said if the appointment is first thing in the morning I can at least provision the rest of my day for other work, be it website development, product photography, or my new gig of making videos for another client who sells music gear. 
 

Anyway, I am happy that I am at least getting support from one of my clients. 

Thanks Anthony. No, I still edit at home but I have largely automated the process with Lightroom, Aurora and Enfuse. I still have to go over the final shots manually, but it's literally a few seconds per image now. When I first started doing this work the editing would take me about an hour or more just to do 20 shots on 1 property. The software batching still takes about 30 minutes to actually run, depending on how I do it. The last few places I did I used Lightroom's new HDR batching feature which is way faster than passing the stacks off to either of the other programs, but the results are not quite as good. Aurora does a great job for exteriors and Enfuse is best for interiors, so if I am doing a really nice place I will stick with those methods. "Meh" homes only get the Lr treatment.  As soon as I am done I use Lr to export the final shots in a very low res format to Google Drive where the agents then do whatever they do with them. The system works very well. 

I'm still fighting a price war that I don't want to be in, unfortunately. The problem here is that for every job there are about 100 photographers and even those who know nothing about real estate or architectural photography are quite happy to throw their lot in with lowball offers. I just lost a job I quoted on for a game lodge because they thought that my $1200 quote was too much. This in spite of it being a 3 hour drive from my home, an overnight stay and then a 3 hour drive back. I guess somebody saw the opportunity to get a little holiday for the cost of fuel and offered to do it for free.  

Interesting story. Yep, all the eggs in one basket is so dangerous, and I see it a lot with small businesses. Sometimes there's simply nothing they can do about it even when they know it.

It's amazing you can shoot a place that fast! I would have assumed 2-3 x that long. I guess they have it all ready to go, and you don't need to do any adjusting.  I have also heard that clients want it yesterday. Having done very few gigs, I don't know if I'd enjoy that environment, though you've seem to have perfected your process to deal with their expectations.

39 minutes ago, GB111 said:

Interesting story. Yep, all the eggs in one basket is so dangerous, and I see it a lot with small businesses. Sometimes there's simply nothing they can do about it even when they know it.

 

It's amazing you can shoot a place that fast! I would have assumed 2-3 x that long. I guess they have it all ready to go, and you don't need to do any adjusting.  I have also heard that clients want it yesterday. Having done very few gigs, I don't know if I'd enjoy that environment, though you've seem to have perfected your process to deal with their expectations.

Yup, it's a finely tuned process. I can thank Olympus, Lightroom and a few other programs for that. Generally for RE work I photograph what I find "in situ", but I do provide the clients with a link to this article I wrote so that they can prepare the space beforehand. Most serious sellers do.  

Alas this same client and I have now parted ways permanently over a copyright infringement by one of their clients that they weren't prepared to take my side on. Their client had the cheek to use my images on their Airbnb listing. I called them out on it and offered to give them better images properly taken and licensed for Airbnb. They had a little frothy and proceeded to complain to the agent's head office about my "unethical" behaviour. Then this person also had the cheek to call me a "scam artist" on my Google Business page. The salt in the wound was the agency principal telling me that they had paid for the images and they were free to give them to whoever they wanted for whatever purpose. I balked on that and told them where they could get off. 

I will miss the regular work they assigned to me, but honestly, that company are just exploiting photographers left and right and as such deserve to follow many other "disruptor" businesses in the real estate industry down the drain. I am now ironically focussing more attention on the Airbnb market, but working directly for the hosts, not for Airbnb (who are also exploiting photographers left and right).