17-Illegal Real Estate Drone Photography: The Penalties Agents Should Know

In this episode, Kamil Sarji is joined by Bill Parmentier from W. Parmentier Media to discuss the increasing role of drone photography in the real estate market. They dive into the importance of using drones to showcase properties from a unique perspective, especially for large estates and commercial properties. Bill explains the legal requirements for drone operators, emphasizing the need for a Part 107 license from the FAA and the significant fines and penalties for unlicensed drone use. The episode also covers the evolving technology behind drones, how real estate agents can use drone photography to create stunning property visuals, and how to avoid costly legal mistakes. Learn about the potential risks involved in flying drones without proper insurance and the legal implications of using drones for commercial purposes, even if you're not charging for it. Bill also shares his experience dealing with wildlife interference and the surprising advancements in drone safety, like obstacle avoidance and remote ID.

Whether you're a real estate agent considering drone photography for your listings or simply interested in the technology behind drones, this episode is packed with useful insights to keep you informed and compliant.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/DruNwnlGQ6U

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Chapters

• 0:51 Just 2 Minutes Questions
• 3:02 The Interview

Transcript

0:00

So, a hawk, huh? Yeah. Hawk like, actually hunting a drone. Yeah. Well, it's not uncommon for birds to attack. Drones, believe it or not. I've never had it happen to me yet, but I've seen videos where it does happen and I've had times where I've had groups of flocks of birds come flying in my drone and thinking to myself, is this going to be the time that they're going to take out my drone? My baby! Well, these things are not cheap. I mean, you know, a basic prosumer level drone is, you know, going close to two grand by the time you get all the gear. You know what? You get two grand flying in the air. You don't want to, you know, have that taken out. Welcome everybody. I'm Kamil Sarji with Gold Door Realty. And today I have Bill. You want to tell us about yourself? Sure. My name is Bill Parmentier. I am the owner of W Parmentier Media. I primarily work in the real estate sphere from the extent of photography, videography, and primarily drones. But I've also worked with the construction industry pretty heavily also, mostly through the Rhode Island Builders Association. Awesome. So Bill's here to get interviewed for the Just Two Minutes, and the first two minutes is just random questions, and then after that we'll get into the real estate industry. Sounds like fun. Right? He's like, hope so. Yeah. It is always fun. Alright, gotta get the clock going. Okay, I have a timer. So what happens if we run out of two minutes? Uh, I stop. You stop at two minutes? I stop, that's it. I mean, you can finish the thing, but I'm not gonna go over the other stuff. Sure, no, it's fine. Alright, and Okay. Uh, at what age did you go bald? Oh, geez. Uh, believe it or not, 21. I went bald early. My father says it's because I used to pick on him for being bald when he was, when I was younger. And he's like, you get paid up, so you got the curse. You get the curse. I don't mind it. Save money on shampoo. Uh, when did you start growing the goatee? Um, I had a beard up until I got married. So about 20 years ago, when I got married, my wife didn't like the full beard. So I went to the goatee and. Been a goatee ever since. I shaved it off once in our marriage, and she's like, Grow it back. I don't know what that says about me. Wow. You should be concerned. But it looks scary without one, I guess. I guess so, I don't know. What's something that you've built that you're proud of? That I've built that I'm proud of? Um, probably my business, all kidding aside. Um, I started really late in starting my business, as far as age wise. Uh, you know, I always thought about doing what I do now. Uh, when I was in my 20s, but never got around to it. And then family came along, and whatnot, and then I got laid off. And, for my corporate job, and started about 10 years ago. You built this empire. I don't know about an empire, but it's, uh, it's enough to pay the bills, as they say, you know. If you had, uh, a hundred dollars, what's the first thing you would spend it on? Probably my family. Like, what would you buy? I'd probably go out for dinner with the family or something like that. You know, we don't get to go out often, but, more than likely, you know, I do a lot with my family, so. Important part. If you were, if you were to travel from here to Connecticut, what transportation would you use? Uh, an elephant with navigation system, a horse with no horseshoes, or a donkey. I like the elephant with the navigation system. My wife will tell you, I can get lost in a paper bag, so I need that navigation system. Yeah, what an awesome elephant. What did we do before, just a side note, what did we do before GPSes? I don't know. It's like, oh, we got time. I stalled enough to, no, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Oh, goodness. What'd you think? That was fun. Cool. So, Bill. Yeah. Bill, Bill, Bill. That's me. Photo. Video. Video. And something special we're going to talk about today. Which is drones. Is drone. Mm hmm. And how it helps realtors, you know, highlight their property, make it look cool, and show, you know, the whole layout of the property. Absolutely. It's a, it's great, especially for larger properties. Works well, definitely well in commercial, you know, commercial properties, but also the larger, I call them the million dollar plus properties that are usually good size acreage, maybe have a nice pool in the backyard or something along that line. Yeah. That's some of the best ways to show that piece of property is with the drone. So what's it take to be a drone pilot? Pilot? Yes, pilot. Yeah. We're actually called the UAS pilot, which is unmanned aerial system. Really? Is that the same thing as UAV uua? UAA? It's called by a number of different things. UAV UAS UAV is unmanned aerial vehicle, so it really depends on who you're talking to. The federal government looks at it as, calls it a UAS. Again, it's all semantics. It's basically flying a drone. In order to do so commercially, you have to have a, what they call a part one oh seven license through the FAA. So what that means is you have to actually go through testing. I tell people it's about this far below, getting your private pilot's license. And as much, you don't have to put in actual hours flying, but you do need to know a lot of the same things that a recreational man pilot would do, recreational pilot would fly. So, it doesn't take a lot. I think as of last time, you're going to bear with me, I've had my license since 2016. Back in 2016, I believe it was like an hour and a half, two hours you had to take the test. You had to pass with a proficiency of 75%, I think, 70, 75%. Then we're required by the FAA every two years to renew our license. It's a little bit easier process for that. So that's pretty much what you're looking at to get your license. One of the things that I find, especially in the, in the real estate industry is the lack of knowledge on that piece. I'm not saying they all know, but I've run into a lot of agents in specific, in particular that thought, Oh, I can just go down to Best Buy, buy a drone, put it up in the air, take a picture of my latest listing, and I'm good to go. Yeah, I've talked to some and they're like, Oh yeah, I have a drone. And I'm like, wait, wait, do you have the license to be able to do it? Not only that, I mean, you're not required by federal law to have insurance, but you're ridiculous if you don't have insurance. Because first of all, the first thing that I hear from people is, well, I've got liability insurance for my business. Most people don't realize that liability insurance doesn't cover drones. So if you take a drone, say I got liability for my own company, I'm going to flow this drone up in the air to inspect a roof, say, and I take out a power line or a transformer. My insurance doesn't cover that. It's a total separate rider that you need to have for drones. Okay. And most insurance companies are not going to give you that rider unless you catch Part 107. So, kind of catch 22. They'll make sure that you, you know what you're doing. Uh, one of the rules in law. Exactly. And then the other thing that most people don't realize is they say, Well, I can fly a drone. I'm just going to fly it. I'm not charging anybody for it. I'm just using it for my listings. I hear that a lot. The reality of the matter is the FAA looks at commercial use of drones as what they call furtherance of business, which is a fancy way of saying if you're using it for your business, whether you're making money off of it or not, you need to have that commercial license. So, okay. So what if you're not using it for business for, you know, kids? If you're just flying around recreationally, there are different restrictions for people that are flying around recreationally, but as long as you're not using it to make money on a YouTube channel or to advertise your business, or as in the example of a roof or inspect roof, say, you can say, well, that's just part of the business. I'm not actually getting any payment for it. I'm just looking at something up, up front. That's when the FAA goes, no, that falls under commercial purview. Matter of fact, there's a story, and I'll see if I can find you a link for it, of a travel vlogger. They had a big YouTube channel, and all they were doing was He's driving around the country and they were flying the drone wherever they were to show vistas and different things that they were seeing. And somebody reported them to the FAA and the FAA said, no, you need to have your license in order to do that because you're making money off of the YouTube channel. Wow. So it's not as cut and dry as you would think. Initially everybody thinks, oh, if I'm going to fly a drone, I'm not making any money for it. So I'm not, I don't have to worry about getting that license. But yeah, you really do need to think about that. Goodness. So, events, because I've seen them. I've gone to like events, outdoor events. I'm like, all right, there's a drone flying around. What the hell is going on? I'd say probably realistically 65 to 75 percent of the time that's somebody flying illegally. For instance, if you're talking about like a sporting event. Say, the football game at Gillette. There are what they call temporary flight restrictions that go into place anytime a major league, even minor league, like the old Paw Sox when they used to be in Patakero, the Woo Sox now. If I were to try to fly over that stadium during the game, it's illegal because you're flying over people. There are heavy restrictions about flying over people. So, that's why if you're at like, say, Waterfire, right? You know, Waterfire down in Providence. And you see somebody flying over it. More than likely they're flying illegally unless they went through a bunch of hoops to get permission because there's waivers you have to sign up for and all kinds of things, but Because it's an event. Exactly. They don't want people But the reality of it, the majority of people that are flying like that are like, Oh, look, there's going to be a water fire. I've got my toy drone that I'm throwing up in the air. I'm just doing it for my own personal use. Doesn't fly. Doesn't fly. Sorry. It does fly, but it might fall. Yeah, well, that's the problem. I tell people that drones are like flying a weed whacker. Because the reality is most drones don't have any type of propeller guards on them. So, if you were standing and it came down at you, what do you think is going to happen? I made the mistake one time, I had an errant drone that was kind of going off track from what I needed it to do and it wasn't acting properly. And it's flying, it's flying about this height. But it's kind of drifting and I made the mistake one time just reaching in and try to grab it because with most drones if you Take them if you can grab them from the center and flip them upside down. They'll automatically shut off Okay When I reached in I missed it by a little bit lost a little bit of the tip of my finger doing that That's how sharp you think plastic blade is not gonna hurt anything, but no, but it's flying so fast. Yeah Well this I don't know what the revolutions per minute are But yeah, pretty fast enough to cut you even with a plastic blade So, so how would they find someone flying around like they see a drone besides like shooting it down or netting it? Which is, well, the nets are legal, are starting to become legal. Shooting it down is a whole other story. I can tell you, I've heard people say, well, if a drone flies over my house, I'll just shoot it out of the sky. You don't want to be doing that. First of all, you're discharging a firearm, probably in a public area. Secondly, Let me back up for a second before I get into this. As a drone pilot, in some aspects, we are bound by the same rules and laws that regular pilots use. I mentioned that a minute ago. So if I get into an accident that causes over four or five hundred dollars, I think it's four hundred dollars worth of damage. Not to my drone, but to something else. It gets investigated by the FAA if it were an airline incident. So that's how serious it can be. So, again, if I come down on top of you and hit you with a blade, how much damage is going to be done? Wow. And, but to go back to answer your question about how would they find out. If you had asked me two or three years ago, I would have said it's very tough to find out, because there's really no easy way to track who's been flying a drone where. Unless you wait and you see until it comes down. Yeah, and then find the person that does it. But the reality is now they have a thing called Remote ID. That went into effect, I want to say it was at the beginning of this year. Oh, sure. I don't know if you've heard about Remote ID. Basically DJI doesn't have that. Oh, they do, they do now. But they're not allowed to be in America. Well, not yet, not yet. That hasn't done, let's not get ahead of ourselves. That's a whole other game. It's It's ugly what they're doing as far as that. And there's really no good manufacturer outside of DJI as far as drones right now. And I want to talk about that in a second. Sure. But just to get the last part about the, uh, the remote ID. As of the beginning, I believe it was the beginning of this year, all drones that are flying, that are being flown have to have what's called remote ID. So there's two ways that that works. One is it's built into the drone itself via the software. So any drone that was built by, I want to say beginning of last year, most of the DJI drones already have that built in. If you have an older drone, you have to buy this little module that goes on to the drone. Now, basically what that does is that sends out a beacon, a signal, sort of like planes have, that the FAA can then find out who was in that area at any given time. So now it's not as easy to get away with things. But that's only if you're buying a newer drone. If somebody has a drone that's from five years ago and still flying it, Yeah they're not complying, it's still tough for them to find that person. So netting, that's something? I was joking around with throwing in the net and catching the Yeah, they actually have, like, they look like bazookas that shoot netting. They've actually, I've seen, there's been a lot of different thoughts on how to get drones out of places that they don't belong. One of them's that. One's trained, I think it was Hawks. They were using actual animals, you know, birds, hawks flying, and they could take them out of the sky. And I saw a really neat device that has been developed. Again, it looks like a bazooka, you know, on the shoulder fired missile or launcher type thing. Yeah. And I saw a video for it the other day, and they just aim it at the drone, and they can literally bring the drone right to where they want to it. It takes over the control of the drone. That's crazy. It is. Very cool stuff, but So, a hawk, huh? Yeah. Hawk like, actually hunting a drone. Yeah. Well, it's not uncommon for birds to attack. Drones, believe it or not. I've never had it happen to me yet, but I've seen videos where it does happen and I've had times where I've had groups of flocks of birds come flying in my drone and thinking to myself, is this going to be the time that they're going to take out my drone? My baby! Well, these things are not cheap. I mean, you know, a basic prosumer level drone is, you know, going close to two grand by the time you get all the gear. You know what? You get two grand flying in the air. You don't want to, you know, have that taken out. So, yeah. Oh my gosh, that's crazy. Thankfully it doesn't happen as often as you think, but it does happen. Alright, so let's talk about you, you know, doing photography of the home. Sure. You know, you photo the home so it can be listed. Now, I know you do drone and you're licensed. Do they fly them through homes too? It's becoming a little bit more common. When I first started in the drone industry, you know, doing real estate, it was, let's put it, difficult at best to be able to fly a drone into a home. Yeah. Because you're worried about damage and stuff like that, you know, if you're going into a million dollar listing, the last thing you want to do is mar up a wall because you hit it with a prop, you know? Or someone's here, like my daughter's here, like, we'll play around and it's like stuck in the hair. Sure, yeah, so you didn't see as much of it. You're starting to see more of it now. They have these things they call cinematic drones. I just picked up one literally a month and a half ago now. And they're about this big. I don't know if you've ever seen the drone racing they do on television, on like ESPN now. It's unbelievable. I can't believe that they They look almost like that. It's about, like I said, about that big around. And those have bumpers on them and they have easier controls. So I'm just in the process now, I'm going to be making that part of my offering where I'm going to be able to fly in from a distance, just so you see the whole property and then fly right into the home and do a fly through of the entire home. Now, again, that's not going to be something you're going to do for a listing that's 250 to 300,000 dollars home. But when you're talking big pieces of property, it's definitely something worthwhile. That's amazing. Yeah. And they're all, I don't know how familiar you are with VR. Yep. Like the MediQuest goggles that you can play games on. This drone, I actually have the drone out in my car right now, actually has a visor that you wear and you're actually flying via the goggles, as opposed to actually flying like you would normally. So I'm actually seeing first person view of where I'm flying. And you can turn and see to the left as you're going. Yep. You can do this. Well, the other, well, the interesting part about it is, I haven't used this feature yet, but there's a feature on the, on the goggles and the drone itself that if I turn my head, the drone will turn. Oh, that's dangerous. Yeah, I know. It's scary, isn't it? From the top of your shoulder, you're like flying into a wall. Well, it's funny because first when I went to the drone, Flying it out, my assistant that goes on a lot of my shoots with me. We went to a field cause I'm like, I'm flying this thing for the first time. I don't want to take anybody out and I'm flying it. I'm finally getting, getting, uh, comfortable with it. And I said, I'm going to do a fly by now. I'm standing like probably between the distance between you and I right now. And talking to my buddy, I get the goggles on. I'm like, Oh, this is so cool. And I'm screaming like 35, 40 miles an hour. I get the drone flies right between the two of us. He about lost it. He's like, what are you trying to do, kill me? I'm like, nah, I got it under control. Wait a second, 35 miles an hour? It goes that fast? That's on slow mode. This thing will do, I think the top speed is like 62, 63 miles an hour. Wow. Yeah. I mean, I am not going to shoot a listing at 62 miles an hour through a house. I'm probably doing, you know, three or four miles an hour going into a home. But yeah, it's really cool stuff that they're doing now. That's amazing. So yeah. So have you tried it in a house yet? Not yet. Your house is the first one. Yeah, yeah. Just as long as I don't take out the cats, I'll be good. I could chase the cats around. That would be fun. My daughters would hate that. If they're listening girls, I would not do that to the cats. That you know of. That I didn't know of. But once I get a little more comfortable, I'm hoping probably in the fall to offer it as part of my listing, as far as doing listings for people. And you could also do what we used to do prior to having these drones come, where you could fly them into the home. Would be you do a fly right up to the door and then we'd use a gimbal, which you've seen the gimbal that I've used For years now the DJI Osmo. Yeah, you just swap over and just do a quick cut So it looks like it's flying right into the house and then you just walk through the house with the gimbal So yeah, there's ways to cheat it up until now, but now yeah flying is way better. Well gimbal. Nobody really likes much more Way fun. Oh, yeah Yeah. You know, one of these days we'll do is part two to this podcast. Yeah. And I'll get you out for, let You Fly the fly. The the Goggles. Drone . It could be fun. Come on. Yeah. You could fly it through your next listing. It would be, it would be awesome. See you fly it through your next listing. Yeah, for sure. That'd be so cool.. So as far as like flying around and taking an aerial shot of the house which is great. Now you're flying, looking at the top aerial view of the house. Do the neighbors get concerned? They're like, hey, I'm nude sunbathing, like, is someone gonna I think there's a lot of misinformation about drones out there. People are always thinking, oh my gosh, you're flying in my neighborhood. You're trying to fly the drone in front of my window to catch me doing something in my house. The reality is I would have to be, like, right up against the window like this for it to even work to look through a window, if it did. And, for the most part, I'm usually pretty good about it. If I'm going to be flying a drone in an area and I know somebody's home nearby, I'll try to give them a heads up and say, Hey, look, I may be flying over your property. I promise you I'm not doing anything. This is the house that I'm flying and aiming for. It's not you. I have had occasions in the past where I've had some client work where I flew over somebody's property and they got upset. They came out screaming at me. Were they a nude sunbathing? No, no. He was actually, he turned out to be a very nice gentleman, but he was upset'cause he thought I was flying over his property doing something that, you know, spying on him in some way. Maybe he was doing something illegal and he felt guilty. Who knows. I hope not. But he's like, oh, that footage is gonna be public. But typically in that case, I'll just say, look, I won't fly over your property legally. I can fly, legally Most people don't realize you don't own the airspace above your house. How much above the house do I own? I don't know the exact number. I know it's a matter of feet. It's not like you own 300 feet up. Believe it or not, the FAA owns all airspace. Even the states and the government don't own that space. You don't own it. The state of Rhode Island, in this case, doesn't own it. The FAA owns that airspace, so they can dictate what can go on there. And some of the laws that, the way they're written currently, and they're starting to change now because people are afraid of drones. But basically the way things are currently is, if you're in an area where there's no expectation of privacy, I can fly. There's no expectation of privacy in your backyard, because you're outside. Yeah. So, would I fly over? That's your own, your own area. If somebody, you know, if somebody was sunbathing in a backyard, am I going to fly over that house? No. Absolutely not. I don't want to make people uncomfortable. I don't want to give people that fly drones like I do for a living a bad name. We already get the flak for that. I don't want people to have that in their mind. So I'm going to avoid that at all costs. I'm going to try to work with people in any way, shape, or form. I can. But the reality is there are guys out there that fly drones, not necessarily in the real estate industry, but you know, they'll start an argument with somebody, say, well, I can do this, and the reality is they can. Wow. But why would you want to start an argument with somebody? I don't get it. Anything weird that you've seen while you were flying? No, nothing, nothing weird. I, I mean, like I said, I've had some weird bird, bird sights. So like I'm in the middle of getting ready to take a picture and all of a sudden this flock of birds comes right across the front of my screen. So I got to wait for them to come out. So basically I'm watching everything I do other than keeping an eye on the drone. I'm watching everything on basically something that's about the size of a cell phone. So I'm setting things up and getting it the way I want to, if it's a photo. And sometimes things like that will happen where a hawk will fly through or a bunch of pigeons will fly through or geese. I've had all kinds of stuff like that happen. That's crazy. Yeah, so yeah, it's interesting. It's always fun. So every shoot's a little bit different. Now, I will say this. The one thing that I would say about drones, if you're going to try to do it yourself, outside of getting the licensing, is really learning how to utilize the camera that's on the drone. It's sort of like, you've heard me talk about classes that I've done in the past, you've been part of them, on how to use your smartphone properly, right? Same thing works for a drone. You can have, The best drone in the world that pretty much flies itself. But if you don't know the basics of how to operate a camera, you're not going to get good shots. Yeah. If you don't know the basics of video, you may say, okay, I can do a video of me doing a complete circle around this house. But it may be choppy, or it may be underexposed or overexposed, and you end up with unusable video or unusable photos. So, if you're going to try to do it yourself, Get your license, get the insurance, but take a lot of time. I look back at some of the stuff that I did early on when I first started doing drone work, and I go, oh my gosh, that's horrible compared to what I do now, because I've learned a lot more tricks on how to operate a drone safely. Technology has gotten better, so you can get much better quality imagery if you take the time to learn how to do it. It's like anything else. Have they improved a lot? I mean, yes, I'm sure they do, from the last 10 years, because I remember getting that for the kids, and it was a pain in the butt, like, Flying it around and like it would go sideways and we couldn't keep it straight. Have they improved that whole thing? Oh yeah. Easier for someone to fly? Immensely. Really? Uh, even drones that were made two, three years ago, fly very different. I shouldn't say fly very differently. The skill needed two, three years ago is a lot higher than it is now. Drones more and more can do what you want them to do almost hands off. I remember my first drone that I got, you know, to be able to do a complete circle of a piece of property. Matter of fact, one of the first drone jobs I had was a, a drone Boathouse down in Somerset, and it was for an architect who was building, had designed this, and it was being built over the course of a summer, so I was hired to go down once every couple of weeks and do a complete circle around that property, and then I was going to take that video and make it into a time lapse kind of thing, so you could see it from when it was dirt all the way to when it was completed. Back then, I had to do manual, so I literally had to fly that circle and try to make it the same distance, the same size circle, all by myself, because that was where technology was back then. Now they have stuff built into the software. I would get up to like 200 feet, I click on my little screen that this is the object that I want to do a radius about, around, and then I tell it I want to go 50, 60 feet, 75 feet out, 100 feet out, and then I just hit it and I can control the speed and it does a complete circle, a perfect circle. Wow. So that's just one example of how technology has changed just in the last five or six years. Yeah, because one of the questions was, how far away are we? From them, just, you know, just, you draw a navigation where you want it to go and shoot, and it just does it's work. We're already there. We're already there. There are some of the higher end drones, you can do it, they call it waypoints. So basically what I can do is I can take a map ahead of time, like a Google map, or a Waze map, whatever you want to call it, pull it up on the screen and I pick different spots. So what I do is I get the drone up in the air, fly it through, that rotation I want, that different angle, different movements I want. And now, say I was doing, again, take that, uh, boathouse project that I was talking about. Say it wasn't a perfect circle. Say I was coming in from the water, doing a half circle, and then coming straight out back to the water. I can now pre program that into the software. Then when I go back three weeks from now, I hit the button, it will go back to where I started three weeks ago, and do the same path, the same flight path. Wow. And it'll do the same thing over and over again. So it's basically like pre programming it. Almost like putting directions into a GPS system. These drones are all run by GPS nowadays. So it's the same technology that we use for it to get to where we're going. So I can see like them setting up a station where it would charge just like the RoboVac. And then it would just go up and then do Google Earth sections, come back, just do sections. They actually already do that in agriculture now. They're doing that in agricultural drones, where you basically, they have these little units that'll take off and they'll fly a pre set route. Wow. And then they'll come back, charge themselves, and then fly the next set. That's awesome. So, I don't know the whole behind the scenes on that, but I think the reasoning is so they can keep an eye on their crops and see where things are. But they also use it for surveying, too. Say, you got a huge piece of wooded area that you can't get in too easy. You can do the survey with the drone that way and just have preset to do that. But there's so much that drones do that people don't even think about. Search and rescue now, that's a big part. Almost every fire department slash police department in the country now is slowly getting on board with having, either hiring a drone pilot that's on call for emergency situations, or. Or having somebody craned within their organization to go up. With like a heat sensor, infrared and all that? Yeah, you can get a low end heat sensing drone for what they call FLIR. Don't ask me what it stands for. It's F L I R, but infrared something. But basically it detects heat signatures. And so they can fly it, say a child gets lost in the woods. They can fly and look for that heat signature in the woods. Second part of that, those heat sensing units, that's really good, especially in the home industry. Real estate, construction, energy codes. Now everything's getting tighter as far as energy efficiency and whatnot. I see this as being the next thing coming out is you're going to start seeing more guys hiring either drone pilots or learning how to use those thermal drones so they can fly over a house and detect where all the heat is escaping from the house. So you can see where all, you know, if you know, it's an older home, you want to say, okay, where is all my heat escaping through? Now you fly over and you go, oh, there it's that part of the eaves. It's all coming out. Yeah. Wow. That's so useful. It is. So, I mean, we're still Home Inspectors to use it. A lot more right now. Yeah. Yeah. And they don't have license or do they They better. The reality is they're supposed to. Roofers. Same thing with roofers. I bumped into a roofer a few years back that I was talking about. He had been using it for a while and didn't realize that he needed his license. And again, like I said, going back to our original conversation earlier, you get into an accident, cause something goes south, your liability as a roofer, your insurance doesn't cover that. Or you get fined also and you get fined. And you get fined. It's a two fold thing. And, but, the advantages of getting that pilot's license and flying a drone is now you don't have to, it's a lot faster to go and do an inspection on a house. You don't have to worry about a guy going up on the roof to inspect a second story. Say it's a two family home. You don't have to worry about somebody getting up on the roof and possibly getting injured just doing an inspection before they've gotten a penny from the client. Yeah. Now you put the drone up in the air and you can take pictures. Now you've got those hard copy pictures. You can then go to the client and say, here's where your leak is on the roof. Or here's where I see that shingles need to be replaced, so to speak, or the whole roof needs to be replaced. Whereas in the past, a customer had to rely on the roofer to tell them and hope that the roofer's telling them this is the truth of what's going on. Now you get the actual pictures. You can show that client. Aside from a home inspector, studying and learning. For the test, do they have to learn how to fly this thing, or is it super easy? The flight part is pretty easy, once you get used to it. I mean, obviously you should be practicing anything before. It's sort of like riding a bicycle. A five year old or a ten year old can do it? Well, ten year olds can do anything nowadays. It's amazing to me. Five year olds? I don't know about a five year old. I mean, I wouldn't want a five year old flying for the danger aspect of it. But the interesting thing is, a lot of the kids nowadays, because they've been doing a lot of gaming, the joysticks that we use for drones, or the controllers that we use for drones, are very similar to the gaming pads that people use. So, it's pretty intuitive. And again, these things fly a lot easier than they did in the past. Matter of fact, a lot of them now have sensing technology so that they won't fly into something. So for instance, I've got a drone that's about this big. I use it for like medium sized jobs. I could fly it right at you. And it's got sensors. It'll stop it before it hits you. So it's basically like eyes built on this little mini cameras. Yeah. that are on the front, the back, and the bottom, usually, of drones, depending on the drone, that are what they call obstacle avoidance. Sort of like cars. To protect it from Yeah, you know how cars nowadays have those cameras on the front of them now to automatically brake for you when, you know, if you're not paying attention? Yeah. I mean, you've got a Tesla, I think, that does that, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's got the sensing. The newer ones don't have the distance sensor, like whatever, ultrasound, uh, it uses the camera to Yeah, that's basically what the drones do. They don't use the ultrasound, they use cameras. Okay. And the same thing, only time that runs into a problem is if there's not a lot of contrast in the area that you're aiming the drone towards. Uh huh. I found that out the hard way. I flew my drone into a upright for a football field. First got the thing, brand new. I was showing a buddy of mine, I said, hey look, this thing's great at avoiding obstacles. And I flew it two or three times right at the upright for the football field. And it went up, went down, it went around it the whole nine yards. And for some reason I came in and the sun must have been hitting just right, and the camera didn't catch it on the drone. And I went smack right into the, all I hear is this gong. Like, it didn't damage the drone surprisingly, but I flew it at about 15 miles an hour. They make them very durable, huh? Some of them are, not all of them. I've been very lucky so far. I've never had an accident that blew apart a drone. And I've never had an accident that anybody's gotten hurt. Now that I've said that, I'm gonna be scared that it's gonna happen, but I've been lucky so far I haven't had that happen. But yeah, ton of things you can do with drones that people don't even think about. So, looking at a house, especially if it's like near water or has, you know, great amount of acreage, like, it's really good to see the visual video of like the whole area and where it is. You know, in the city or a town or how close it is to water. Well, not only that, neighborhoods. Uh, a lot of people want a home that's in a secluded neighborhood, but near everything, you know, maybe it's a cul de sac it's in, but they want to know that it's near the local school system or it's near the fire department and so on. So near mcDonald's, McDonald's, whatever, yeah, whatever the case may be. You get two, 300 feet in the air. Now you can see the whole neighborhood and that's a selling point for real estate agents. You can say, Oh, look, this is what the neighborhood looks like. Cause people, you know, especially. Couples with families, they want to know, is this going to be a safe neighborhood to have my kids in? Is this a place where they can play around in the front yard and not have to worry about it? I did a house in Attleboro not too long ago that was on a beautiful little cul de sac, and we were able to show the imagery from, you know, 200 feet in the air, and you could see the whole cul de sac, and you could see the whole neighborhood. You could see the school system that was right down the road, and so, those, those are the type of things that are selling points that, uh, I'm sure you've seen the story. It's not like a picture of a house. It's like you're creating a story of like how you're gonna live in this neighborhood. Exactly. And the other thing is, you know, and I'm sure you've seen this, a lot of people want to know when they're getting ready to buy a house, what's the neighborhood look like? How's the school system there? You know, now that's just one more piece that you can show them and say, okay, well, this is what the neighborhood overall looks like right in that area that you're looking at this house in. The other thing that I've had is down at the Warwick area, I'm not going to get into today the whole flying near an airport thing because there's all the regulations for that, but I've actually had agents hire me to fly near down the Warwick area to show how close the property they were selling was to the beach. It was only a block away. So I flew up high enough so you could see, and we actually made a graphic on the photo that showed the path to get to the beach. Yeah, close to the water is huge. Well, yeah, I'm sure. On the water is even Even better, but, but the reality is people want to know where those amenities are. You know, am I close to, you know, I'm a big Walmart shopper. How close am I to the Walmart? Now, granted, I can only fly so high in the sky legally, so, I mean, if the, if the Walmart's four miles away, I'm not going to get the picture from, you know, and if I could get the picture of it, it'd be like this big, and people wouldn't even know what it is. But so, yeah, that's the unique angles that you can get with a drone that you can't get with, you know, just a regular listing photographer that's just going to come in and photograph, the other, photograph the, you know, traditional way. The other thing that I've noticed with drones that, from an aspect of being able to get unique views is even just on the exterior photos, you can get higher angles. So I may still only be seven or eight feet up in the air. But I can get into areas with the drone that I couldn't get into with a tripod and a camera. So now I can fly from eight feet, nine feet in the air and get a nice shot at the front door. Maybe there's trees that are blocking the front of the house. I can fly that drone right into the opening so I can get a good picture of the house. We're trying to do that traditionally. Forget it. It would be a pain in the butt to try to get just the right angle. I'd have to give on a stepladder or whatever it happens to be. So when you look at a home, then you start imagining like, okay, how do I want the scene to look? Exactly. And the thing is, I'm always gonna tell any potential listing that you want a combination of both. It's never all drones. It's never all photography because even with no fly into homes, there's nothing that beats a good quality camera for doing interior photos. But if you're doing video work, it's great for doing, the drones are great for doing the interior stuff, but I wouldn't use them for pictures. I can do that traditionally a lot better, a lot higher quality than with a drone. So last thing I want to talk about is, not to get into politics, but just imagine we create a brand here, a drone brand, and you know, Russia, we want to spy on Russia. We want to see what it looks like, you know, where all the things are. And so this drone that we create, I'm going to put some software in it to send back footage. Because everybody over there is gonna. So, why not put that software in there to, like, you know, hidden software to send back footage or pictures of, now we have a whole map of Russia. That's a, that's a very real concern. And that's why you're hearing about the whole conversation about DJI drones. You've heard that, you know, the United States just essentially said that TikTok is going to be banned at the end of the year if they don't divest. TikTok, they can see what we're doing in the bathroom, you know, like besides taking aerial footage of the video. Now, DJI, which is, for those who don't know, is a Chinese company. And there's a bill that just went through the government. I think the initial committees, I don't think it's actually gone on a full vote yet. I know it's supposed to go soon to possibly outlaw all DJI drones, because it's the very same thing. DJI, up until recently, they just changed this, I think, because of this possibly coming down the road. Gave you the ability, as a pilot, I can keep flight logs on my controller. So it tracks all my flights for me, where I've been, also any pictures that I've taken, put in, get attached to that log. Well, DJI, hearing that there's a possible ban of that, they've now shut that all down. I can't do that anymore. Okay. To prove that they're not Yeah. DJI has said from the beginning that They're not a Chinese government entity, but the concern is still that they're going to do something like that. So they're trying to be proactive. A couple of other things they're doing is they're going to be partnerships with some United States manufacturers where they're going to, in essence, use their drone technology and sell it under the United States technology. But to answer your question, it's very easy to do something like that. Nowadays, if we were building a drone and we had to. The technology's there, we just have to have the know how how to do it, where we could literally be going into another country, and we probably already do that, let's be honest. With our military drones, there's no doubt in my mind, we're already doing a lot of that. But it is kind of genius if you think about it, that if you were a country that was trying to spy on another country Get the people that live in that country recreationally to just fly around and get all that information for yourself. It's genius. I don't think it's happening right now, but there's potential for it, so. So here's another thing that nobody's thought of yet, and I hope they don't steal my idea. But if they do, they should pay me some money. Sure. Where you have all these drones in a different country, right? Like, say, Russia. And then we hit the button. All the drones, wherever they are, they're sleeping, whatever, in someone's home. They come together, and they create this big robot. And then like, ah, and it takes over the country and like, yeah, listen to me, I'm your ruler now. There was talk when drones first came out, and I think the military is still working on it, they call swarms. Oh, yeah, yeah. So they basically, you know, swarm a bunch of little tiny drones. But that's a dude cute, like lit up, oh, look at those. Well, they do that now for fireworks now. A lot of towns are getting rid of fireworks altogether and going with the drone technology, which is really cool. But, let's be honest, there are drones out there right now that the military has that we know nothing about. That's pretty cool. That could do some, probably do some serious damage. They're all little tiny things that And I don't want to know about. I don't either. You know, I, the technology between AI and everything else that's coming out can be scary if you start thinking too much down the line, but yeah, I mean, it's like I said, even in the short, you know, five to nine years, 10 years that I've been part of this, I've seen so much change. We're, we're like on fast, Full speed right now. I mean, if you think about it, I'm in my 50s. When I was a kid, you know, computers were just, personal computers were just starting to become the thing. And it took 10 years for us to get to one point, then 8 years, then 7, then 6, then 5. Now technology, you know, technology comes around so quickly. iPhone, for example, that was released today, nine months from now, they're going to come out with an iPhone that's going to have newer technology. So we're not waiting years to do things. We're waiting months now to get the new technology. So I can only imagine what it's going to be like when my kids get to be my age. Things are going to be, like, speed of light, you know? I love technology. I do too, but it's amazing how quick it moves. It's hard to keep on top of it too, that's the other thing. So Bill, how do people find you? They can go to wpp. photos is my website. That's the easiest way to get a hold of me. Or you can do bill at wpp. photos. That's my email address, that'll go right there to me. I try to be as responsive as possible. I do everything from, I not only, Do listings, real estate listings and the such, but I also train. So I'm willing to always go in and have conversations and teach how to use your smartphones and drones. And so I like, that's another one of the little side note side things that I've really started to enjoy doing over the last year or two is teaching people how to use their technology, especially in the construction industry and the real estate industry, because, you know, I mean, the lower end listings, you're not going to want to spend, you know, four or 500, 1,000 dollars. You have Nokia flip that list. Well, you can, if you know what you're doing. And I know you had a real estate photographer on one of your previous episodes, and I will say this 100%, always the best way to go is to have it done professionally. But if you're in a, either a time crunch or in a situation where the, uh, the access, not only just the access, but the cost of doing it is just prohibitive, then at the very least learn how to use the technology you have well. Because there are a lot, you know, MLS, there's a lot of bad photographs out there. And a lot of times, I'd say 95 percent of the time, A little bit of knowledge could make those photos look a lot better. Not that it would ever put a It helps sell it faster or eliminate people who are like, Oh, what's it look like really? Can I go see it? Oh no, this is not what I Cause the kitchen is like weird, so I don't want that house. But if they took a good picture, It eliminates all these people who don't want that type of kitchen. Which is also gonna save you time as a realtor. Cause you don't wanna have an open house where you're gonna have a bunch of people show up and go, Oh, that wasn't what I expected. Now you've just wasted their time and your time. Quality people, not quantity. Exactly. You would rather have two or three come that are probably potentially going to put a bid on the house as opposed to a hundred and only one puts a bid on the house. Exactly. The end of the day. So, yeah, it's an interesting part of the industry that do I think that real estate photographers are going to go away? I don't think they'll ever go away because there's always going to be the need for good quality high end photos. But I do see that lower end of the market really starting to tighten up. And with technology getting the way it is, I think realtors with a little bit of know how can go in and do most of those themselves. Yep. Awesome, Bill. Thank you very much for stopping by and come back some other time. Absolutely. Next time we'll have you flying the drone. That'll be another video.