WGAN-TV Ben Claremont Top 10 Tips for Building a Profitable Virtual Tour Business-#1742-How Much Should You Charge?

WGAN-TV Ben Claremont Top 10 Tips for Building a Profitable Virtual Tour Business-#1743-How To Price Packages Based On Quality

Hi All,

In these WGAN-TV Short Stories (#1742 and #1743, above), Virtual Tour Pro Course Creator Ben Jones talks about how to price virtual tours for non-residential real estate.

You can see the entire interview here:

✓ Transcript: Ben Claremont Top 10 Tips for Building a Profitable VT Business

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Transcript (#1742 video above)

All right, so now moving on to number four, which brings me to pricing and packages. And another one, which is potentially the most common question I get with Virtual Tour, beginners, intermediate and even advanced people.

And that is, how much should you charge? This is such a topic of interest and there's so much debate and uncertainty around this topic. And yeah, you ask 10 different people and you get 10 different answers.

So, I'm going to answer that in this, by the way, I won't give you an ambiguous answer, but I'd start by saying, how much is your time worth? Is your time with nothing? No. Your time is worth money. No matter what you're doing, if you're doing it for something else, your time is worth money.

And again, when you're charging for your time and your services, your clients will actually get more value out of it than if you're doing it for free. If you do it for free, they won't take it seriously. And you're not treating your own time seriously. So your time is worth something.

So I'd start by saying, you need to figure out the absolute bare minimum your time is worth to begin with.

And I would suggest at the bare minimum, even for an hour of your time, maybe two for a really basic Virtual Tour, the minimum for your time would be at least $200 to go out to another business and give them something that will be an asset to them, helping them with their marketing, absolute minimum, $200 for your time.

I see too often, people going out there advertising their services as $50 a tour or $100 a tour and that includes 50 photos and so on. How are you making any money? Is your time worth $5 an hour? You can't even eat charging those kinds of numbers.

So what is your time worth? It needs to be worth like less than half a day of your time. What is that worth? Truly think about it because I can guarantee you your time is not worth nothing.

So let's start with $200 as the absolute minimum for a beginner, just starting out with a point and shoot 360 camera. That is what I would consider the starting point. When you go out for your very first paid client, whatever that number is for you, again, minimum is $200: that is the starting point and it grows and grows from there.

You go on your first professional shoot. You might charge that $200 just to build your confidence, to prove to yourself that you can do it. It's okay, the world isn't going to end, if you charge a client money for your work, and then you've proven it to yourself, then you can start scaling those prices up and offering more.

With pricing, it's hard for me to give exact numbers because the thing is, pricing is a very custom thing. There are hundreds of factors that are included with Virtual Tours that could make up any individual Virtual Tour. The amount of photos; the level of editing you put into them; the techniques; the gear that you are using; hosting.

There are so many things that go into pricing and it's a very custom experience. What I would say is, what you need to do is create ... you need to start by creating a package. So put together a package of something, you know, that you are competent and confident at delivering. What does that package involve? How many photos?

What type of photos? What type of camera are you using? Which software are you using to edit this photo? What is your overall turnaround time? Write all of these factors down because that's going to be your first package.

And, that is something you are going to put a number on. So if you're a beginner, it might be like five photos. I'm going to shoot with a basic 360 camera, like the Insta360 ONE X2. And I'm going to edit this in Kuula. And it's going to include basic hotspots and a link to the website of the business. And, maybe that's it for the basic one.

That is now a definite product, the offerings. Not ambiguous, you're not adding stuff later. These are the parameters of the product you're offering. Then you can assign that a price. You can't just keep it open and add stuff later and just being too variant on your prices, because that makes it really hard to price and deliver packages.

What I would suggest is putting some packages together, start with that first package. Once you've done it, and you've offered it to a client or maybe two clients, it's a good idea to offer levels of packages of Virtual Tours. So there's beginner, intermediate and advanced, which is what I teach my students to create. So you need three packages, essentially.

Once you're at, I would say an intermediate level, once you've done your first few shoots, that's when you need to start putting together packages, a pitch deck maybe, and just being really specific about what you're outlining, what you're delivering in each of those three packages.

Transcript (#1743 video above)

So that's when--

- What's an example of what's in package two and package three?

- Good question. That's when you're going to take these variables, like the photos, like the amount of editing, the techniques that you're using, you might have some Add Ons like Google Street View upload; could be in your medium to high-end packages. There are so many variables you can add, you can shoot with high-end equipment.

You can have more interactive hotspots that incorporate elements of the business more, informational hotspots, extra photos that go within the Virtual Tour.

There are so many things you can add, but what I'm going to do now is give you a rough ballpark figure of what I think rough prices would be for each of these three packages and roughly what would be in each of them, if that would be helpful to everyone watching.

So, okay, here's how I see it. Here are the ballpark figures for beginner, intermediate and advanced.

For beginner, let's say it's a five photo tour with an entry level 360 camera, really basic editing. You can use in-built HDR, if you want, if you're a beginner. The ballpark figure would be roughly $200 to $500 a tour for maybe five to 10 photos.

And again, this would depend on you and what you decide to offer. You can offer the high-end of the beginner level or the low end.

So that would depend on whether it's the lower end in being $200 or the higher end being $500. For intermediate; let's say we're putting this tour together ... this package together for ourselves now.

I'm going to say, it's going to be a 10 photo tour that we're going to offer. And it's going to do with a medium range, 360 camera. So maybe something like a Ricoh Theta Z1, or could be maybe an XPhase Pro S or maybe a QooCam 8K if you can get good results with it. And you're doing a little bit more with the editing.

You're using a slightly better platform, maybe you're offering Google Street View and maybe your interface looks a bit more professional with your end result.

That's when you can start charging more. So for intermediate, you could charge anywhere from $300 to $1,200 a tour depending on how many of those things you want to offer.

Again, it depends what you want to offer yourself. If you want to keep it super-simple; if it's only a couple of photos and basic basic editing, and you're at intermediate level, I'd charge closer to $300, but if you want to go above and beyond, offer all those extra things, like all those hotspots, 10 photos, Google Street View, go closer towards $1,200 a tour. Finally, there's--