Ask the agent
How do I grow past being the only person who can shoot?
Don’t hire a shooter first. Booked five days a week is the ceiling, not the goal: price caps out and there’s no sixth day. Right now you own a job with a camera, and the only move left is not holding the camera on every shoot. Three hires, in order.
Hire one is the bottleneck, not the camera
Look at your week as blocks. Shooting in one color. Editing and the inbox in another. The second color is hire one.
Editing at fifty cents a photo. Anna at PixlMB does ours. Or a VA at $7 to $12 an hour on the calendar and the invoices. Pick whichever one is eating your nights.
You keep shooting. You stop doing the work that happens at 11 PM. That alone gets your evenings back, and it costs less than a single shoot a week.
Which one first? Whichever one you’d be doing at 11 PM tonight. If you’d be editing, it’s the editor. If you’d be answering a text about Thursday’s lockbox, it’s the VA.
The second shooter comes after the standard is written
Most people hire a second shooter right here. That’s hire two, and it’s too early.
First the package sheet, the shot list, the delivery template. On paper, not in your head. Without them the shooter guesses, and the agent notices by the second listing.
Pay him flat per shoot. You keep the agent and the edit. He’s a cost, not a partner, and he’s only worth having once the page he’s working from exists.
That’s the whole reason the standard goes first. A second shooter without a shot list produces a second look, and the agent sees two companies with your name on both. With the page, he produces your look on a house you never drove to.
Someone who runs the operation so it survives a week without you
Hire three is the one nobody warns you about. Scheduling, agents, QC, and every handoff between them.
It’s harder than shooting. Good photographers try it, hate it, and go back to the camera. That’s legitimate, if you chose it. Just know the income that doesn’t stop when you stop shooting lives on this side of the line.
For ten years I paid a company, not a person. Nobody ever asked me to care who held the camera, and I didn’t. That’s what makes this possible. The agent is loyal to the company that shows up, not to the hands on the tripod.
The income that doesn’t stop when you stop shooting isn’t a trick. It’s a company that still delivers by nine when you’re not the one who shot it. Each hire gets you one step closer, in that order.
Order beats speed. The camera is the last thing you hand off.
This week: pick the seat, editing or the inbox, and write the one page that runs it. Hand it off next week.
The delivery checklist
What she actually needs when the files go out. Free. Then take the sixty-second roadmap quiz and I tell you what to fix first.
Get the checklistGet my roadmapStraight answers
- What should a real estate photographer outsource first?
- The bottleneck, not the shooting. Editing at about fifty cents a photo, or a VA at $7 to $12 an hour on the calendar and invoices. The camera is the last thing you hand off.
- When should I hire a second photographer?
- After the package sheet, shot list and delivery template are on paper. Hire before that and the shooter guesses, and the agent notices. Pay flat per shoot; keep the agent and the edit.
- How do I make money when I’m not shooting?
- Hand off the seats in order: bottleneck, shooter, operator. The agent books the company, not the person with the camera, so the company can keep delivering without you in the house.
Related questions
Julian Lundgren sold real estate for ten years before he shot a listing for money. He runs Cineminn, a Minneapolis real estate photography studio, and writes these answers from the agent’s side of the table. Send a question to info@cineminn.com.