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Are aerial drones for property marketing taking off?

Yes, aerial drones for property marketing are becoming a popular tool for agents operating in prime rural and seaside areas, so how do you get in on the aerial action, asks Nigel Lewis.

Nigel Lewis

Aerial photography image

It’s a funny thing but the laws of perspective make properties look much grander from above and for this very reason, agents selling smart detached, countryside properties have often used aerial shots.

Until recently this meant hiring a cherry picker and sometimes even a helicopter to get a good birds-eye view photo, but now drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) as they are officially known, make this much easier.

GOOD NEWS… AND LESS GOOD

Aerial drones for property marketing may be expensive to buy and complicated to operate – but not prohibitively so. Consequently, their use has been – excuse the pun – taking off.

Serious drones for commercial work cost between £1,500 and £10,000 and the more sophisticated ones can now carry heavy digital SLR cameras to shoot both high-resolution pictures as well as video footage.

Rob Stoyle image

Rob Stoyle, from Helmores, in Devon has been flying drones since he was a teenager!

The catch is that you need to have a licence to operate one if it is for commercial purposes, a process that is expensive, intense and time consuming. Courses take up to a week and the fees are approximately £1,000.

Faced with this, some agents are (naughty, naughty) instead using drones to film properties without a licence or without permission from the Civil Aviation Authority (more on this later) and without proper insurance.

Using them illegally can be appealing to agents, given the cost and bureaucracy of using a drone properly. But, if caught, you can be fined up to £5,000 or given a prison sentence.

An obvious alternative is to use an aerial photography agency, but again, be careful – not all of them are licensed.

Gordon Armstrong of Kestrel-Cam specialises in providing aerial photography for surveys within the commercial property sector. He’s worried by the number of unlicensed operators in the sector and says he’s got an estate agent friend who is using an unlicensed supplier.

“I berate him every time I see him but he’s only being charged £30 per property so what’s he supposed to do?” he says.

Cowboys such as this mean that the CAA takes illegally operated drones very seriously. In April this year the first suspected collision between a drone and an airliner took place on the approaches to Heathrow airport, preceded by six recent near misses.

BASIC FLYING RULES

The CAA has issued basic guidance for anyone flying a drone with a camera, whether it’s for pleasure or business. These are that you must:

  • always be able to see the drone;
  • not fly over 400ft;
  • fly safely – you’ll be prosecuted if you don’t;
  • not fly within 50m metres of people, vehicles, buildings or structures unless you have written permission from a local authority, the CAA or a property owner to do so;
  • not fly near congested areas such as busy streets or large gatherings of people such as at football matches or stadium concerts.

But if you want to fly a drone for commercial purposes then the CAA says you’ll need permission (costing £112-£224) to conduct aerial work on a regular basis. It wants to be “assured of the competence of the person who will be flying the device… and that the ‘pilot’ therefore will need to undergo an assessment process.”

It takes skill. You need to fly the drone well enough to position it in the right spot to maximise the photo opportunity, get everything in frame and make it look photogenic.

This means taking a course on airmanship, airspace, aviation law and good flying practice as well as both flight and theory tests and instruction on how to put together an Operations Manual.

Once you’ve taken this, it is valid for 12 months and then reviewed annually but you’ll need to take a new one if you start using a different class of drone. Also, the CAA requires you to have proper insurance before it will issue permission.

You also need to be careful when filming or photographing a property. There are data protection issues around such aerial work. If you inadvertently take pictures of people or properties next door to your target house, for example, then you may intrude on their privacy.

More information is available from the Information Commissioner’s Office website, and details of courses are available online, although one of the larger providers is EUROUSC International, which is approved by the CAA.

THE DRONE AGENT

Flying drone imageSo what’s it like to get the qualifications and become a ‘drone estate agent’? One remarkable story is that of Rob Stoyle, 44, from Crediton in Devon who runs longstanding local estate agent Hellmores. It’s part of the Experts in Property network of 80 agents who multi-list in the SW.

His path to drones started in his teens when he began building and flying model aircraft and eventually helicopters.

“Later, after I started a family that avenue of pleasure was shut but, during my 26 years as an estate agent I have always thought it would be good to get a camera on a helicopter, get it up in the air and take some cracking photos to show the lovely Devon countryside that we’re surrounded by,” he says.

“But it never happened. Then, five years ago drones came on the scene and it got my brain ticking again. So a few years ago I decided to get one just to see what I could do it with – with a GoPro camera on it – to do videos of properties.”

“It was a DGI Phantom (approx. £1,200) and the videos proved popular but I found that putting films together was time consuming and trying to get clients to pay for them was difficult so we ended up offering it as a value added service instead.

“That then lead on to aerial photography and now we’ve got three drones. The biggest is an DGI S900 (£8,000 with all the kit) which can lift a large digital SLR camera plus two smaller ones if you’re in a location where we need to be a bit more discreet.”

However, Rob says drone photography is not suitable for every property. The strict rules mean you can’t fly a drone near a public road or other houses without additional permissions so really, he says, you can only fly them around in more open house locations such as detached houses without close neighbours.

Drone image“Drones work best for big new-build developments, country houses, coastal properties on cliffs – anything that’s got public space around it,” says Rob.

Rob completed his drone pilot’s training three years ago and has permission for the CAA and insurance for up to £5m.

“The training is pretty chunky – you learn a heck of a lot of general aviation rules because you can do a lot of damage with one of these things if you’re flying where you shouldn’t be,” he says.

“You have to learn to read air maps and be aware of airfields or airports nearby and do a safety report each time the drone goes up near one. It’s pretty stringent – you can’t just rock up with your drone and fly.

“It was easier for me because I’d flown model aeroplanes before but they’re not that difficult to fly as they all have gyro stabilisers now with GPS. So, if you just let go of the joysticks it will just stop and hover on the spot.

“And if you’re any good on PlayStation then you’ll also find drones relatively easy to pilot because your hand/eye coordination will have already been developed.

“It does take skill. You need to be able to fly the thing well enough that you are able to position the drone in the right spot to maximise the photo opportunity, get everything in frame and make it look photogenic.”

BUSINESS BENEFITS

Rob’s property drone work has also had an expected benefit. Via word of mouth Rob has got paid TV work including a recent BBC documentary about the 1066 Norman invasion and an episode of ITV’s Neighbours from Hell as well as work for a bike charity event and a local travel company.

“There is a shortage of experienced drone pilots in the UK – a lot of people have got the licence but not all are used to dealing with the technical and creative requirements of TV work or know how to produce cinematic images,” says Rob.

He thinks most agents would prefer to phone up one of the aerial photography companies and get then to do it rather than getting the qualification – and he does some drone work for non-competing agents.

“But I try and focus on doing it for my agency first – it’s a unique thing we do. We market ourselves as the aerial marketing estate agent,” he adds.

MORE INFORMATION
September 16, 2016

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