Some listings sell partly on where they are. A view, a lot that backs onto open space, a street that explains the price. Your photos handle the house, and then the part doing half the selling sits in the listing description, where a buyer has to take your word for it. Closing that gap is what an aerial is for, and it runs $200 for photos or $300 for video.
What a drone aerial actually is
Photos and video shot from above the property, showing the lot lines, the yard, the street and what surrounds the house. The house is in the frame, and the subject is everything around it. The stills come back in your photo set and the video gets cut into your listing video, so it arrives as part of the delivery rather than as a separate thing to chase.
It's flown as a licensed job, which is worth knowing when you compare quotes, and there's more on that further down. On our side it sits on the drone aerials line of the services page.
What it's actually for
The aerial does its best work explaining something a ground shot can't reach. That's usually one of these:
- A view. Coastline, a bay, hills, a skyline. From the street the view is a claim in the listing description. From above it's proof.
- A big or unusual lot. Acreage, a corner lot, a lot that backs to a park or open space. Ground photos show the house; the aerial shows what comes with it.
- Proximity that's hard to describe in words. "Two blocks from the park" reads different once a buyer sees the park in the same frame as the roofline.
- Anything hillside. Terracing, a pool built into a slope, a driveway that switches back. The shape of the property is the sell, and it only reads from above.
You can see the range of what that looks like in the aerials section of the portfolio, lagoon-front, hillside, coastal and neighborhood shots included.
If the listing description is doing the work
If you've written "steps from the park", or "unobstructed bay views", or "just under half an acre", that sentence is a claim, and the buyer is being asked to take it on trust while the photo set stays inside the house. That's the gap an aerial closes, and in our experience it's the one that goes unnoticed most often, because the shot gets left off by default rather than turned down on purpose.
An aerial turns that line into something a buyer can check in the first few seconds of scrolling. When the location is part of why the house is priced where it is, it earns a frame of its own.
When you'd be spending the money for nothing
An ordinary lot on an ordinary street, with everything a buyer needs already visible from the sidewalk, is the case where the aerial photographs fine and changes the result very little. The house is still the story, and the interior and exterior set is what a buyer actually scrolls through first. If that's the listing, we'd rather point the $200 at something that moves it, like a set of feature photos on the kitchen and the primary bath, or a vertical cut of your video for social.
Hearing that from us is the point. An aerial on the wrong listing is a line on an invoice that photographs well and sells nothing.
What it costs, and whether you already have it
Three separate lines, and it's worth knowing which one you're buying. Aerial photos run $200, aerial video runs $300, and aerial twilight photos are a separate $300 from ground-level twilight. None of them scale with square footage the way the packages do.
Aerials are also the line where our packages split. We run four of them, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Diamond, and the top two include aerial photos and aerial video already. Silver and Gold carry neither, so on those it's an add-on at the prices above.
Aerial photos come back with the rest of your photo set within 24 hours, and aerial video ships with your listing video within 72, since it's cut into that edit.
When moving up a package beats adding it on
Gold is $800 and Platinum is $1,100, so the step between them is $300. Adding aerial photos and aerial video to a Gold booking separately comes to $500. Moving up costs less than bolting on, and the listing video steps from the highlight cut to the cinematic one on the way, which is another $150 of difference if you were buying that by itself.
The exception is when you only want the stills. Aerial photos on their own are $200, which sits under the upgrade, so that's the one case where adding to Gold is the cheaper move. Worth checking the square footage first, because Silver and Gold are built for homes under 3,000 sqft and Platinum takes over past that anyway. If you want to know what the video gains in that step, what changes between the tiers breaks it down.
Aerial twilight is its own thing
Aerial twilight photos are $300, separate from ground-level real twilight at the same price and separate again from the virtual twilight that comes in every package. It's the version we point at hillside and view properties, because the two things that carry a twilight shot, warm windows and a sky that still has colour in it, both read better from above when the view is doing the selling.
Real twilight of any kind means coming back at actual dusk, so it books around sunset rather than inside a normal daytime session. If you're weighing it against the edited version, real twilight and virtual twilight covers where each one holds up.
Why the license actually matters
Our photographers are FAA Part 107 licensed, and the person flying the drone is the same one shooting your photos. That matters more once the listing goes public, because the aerial then sits on every portal where anyone can see it. Flying commercially without the license is an FAA violation, and the exposure reaches past the pilot: the agent who booked the shoot can be on the hook too. Worth asking whoever you hire for aerials, us included.
What we'd tell you on the phone
Send the address before you book. If the lot backs to open space, sits on a hill, or has a view worth showing, we'll say so and the $200 to $300 is an easy yes. If it's a flat lot on a standard block, we'll tell you that too, and point the budget somewhere it does more.