Giraffe360 is a We Get Around Network Marketing Partner



Ask a real estate photographer what a shoot costs them and almost every answer you get back is a price. That's a $400 shoot. I charged $800 for that. Those are revenue numbers, and revenue and cost sit on opposite sides of the ledger. So I built the cost model for my own business, filled in every line, and then used it to look at where a single pass system like Giraffe360 actually moves the number and where it does not. The spreadsheet is free and there is no email gate: https://wgan.info/costpershoot

Here is my number. On a 2,000 square foot house, my fully loaded cost is $377.74. My average job is $400. That leaves $22.26 of margin per shoot, and at 20 shoots a month, $445 of monthly profit for the entire business. To be fair to myself, that is after the business paid $50 an hour for every shooting hour, so when I am the one holding the camera I am collecting roughly $2,500 a month in wages before we get to that $445. That is the honest reason this feels fine from the inside. I am not paid in profit, I am paid in wages. The business as a business is barely clearing, which is fine if you know it and dangerous if you do not.

Four lines are the ones people get wrong. Labor is not what you pay yourself, it is what it would cost to hire somebody to do the job, wages and payroll tax and workers comp included, which for me is $50 an hour and $125 for 2.5 hours door to door. Overhead is $1,920 a month divided across 20 shoots, about $96 a job gone before I pick up a camera. Equipment is $16,000 of kit on a three year life, $22 a job. And re-shoots, the line nobody prices, run 4% of my jobs and carry a $7.62 per job reserve. Two traps while you build yours: the IRS mileage rate already includes insurance and maintenance, so do not also put your car in overhead, and software has its own lines, so do not double count it either.

Then watch what one routine concession does. An agent asks for $50 off. The $400 becomes $350, the cost barely moves because only the card fee drops, and the margin goes from plus $22.26 to minus $26.29. A $48 swing on a $50 discount, and you cannot volume your way out of it because at $350 every job loses money. The most useful number on the sheet is break even volume. Mine is 17.3 shoots a month just to cover costs. I do 20. That is two and a half shoots of cushion in the whole business, and one quiet agent or one bad February turns a slow month into a losing month.

So where does a single pass workflow change the lines, not the features? Labor drops from $125 to $80 on one capture pass instead of a photo pass, a scan pass, and a walk with the laser measure. Editing goes from $48 to $10, and that one is structural rather than faster, because images come back inside the subscription and my $10 is reviewing and hitting send. Floor plans go from $15 to zero, drawn and measured on their end in the same pass with no return trip. Tour stitching goes from $12 to zero, equipment goes from $22 to zero because the camera is in the subscription, software halves, and the re-shoot reserve drops from $7.62 to $2.15 because automated capture is consistent shot to shot. Vehicle and overhead do not move at all. No camera shortens Highway 80 and no camera makes your insurance cheaper. New cost per shoot: $228.80.

The part I actually think matters is not the $149 a job. It is that break even volume goes from 17.3 shoots a month to 7.7, and my cushion goes from two and a half shoots to twelve. That is not a savings story, it is a resilience story, and it is the difference between a business that dies in a slow quarter and one that just has a quiet quarter. Giraffe360 quotes per account based on volume, so get your own number, but once the sheet exists you will know what to do with it: my monthly headroom is $2,978, and under that it pays for itself.

Two places I do not think this works, and I left both in. At low volume it gets tight fast. At five shoots a month total headroom is about $1,200, so the subscription has to fit under that or you have made a bad month worse. And in my own case, remember that zero on my marketing line. At 20 shoots a month I am about one a day and I am not capacity constrained, so the two jobs a day becomes four throughput math you will hear about this category is worth nothing to me. That argument gets real north of 35 to 40 shoots a month, when you are genuinely choosing between a camera and a second shooter. Full disclosure: Giraffe360 is a WGAN Marketing Partner. They did not script this video and they had not seen it.

Learn more about Giraffe360: https://wgan.info/giraffe360-forum

About Giraffe360:
Giraffe360 is an all in one real estate capture system that pairs an automated camera with a subscription that includes image editing, floor plans, and virtual tours from a single capture pass.

Topics covered in this video include: Giraffe360, cost per shoot analysis, break even volume, real estate photography pricing, overhead allocation, single pass capture, floor plans, re-shoot reserve, Sparks Media Group

Run the numbers on your own business and post your cost per shoot below. I want to see how far off I am from everybody else, and this thread will be more useful than the video.