According to US copyright law, the photographer (Columbus Pics) retains full ownership rights to every photo we take, regardless of whether a contract is signed. When you pay our fee, you are licensing the right to use our photos of your property. This is just how the law is written.
By purchasing a license, we grant you broad license to use the photos to market the home (in both print and digital marketing), and post images to the MLS.
In practice, we are not litigious. While we do guard against obvious abuse (like someone who is not a Columbus Pics client using our location photos), we don’t make our clients sign contracts. You can reuse the photos taken at your shoot to promote your business, and if you want to share pictures with homeowners (or if you are a homeowner and want to share with your realtor) that’s fine with us. We’re all on the same team.
We often reuse and/or resell photos taken at your shoot. There are a number of reasons for this.
1) We keep a location library of community common areas (pools, club houses, and city streets) available for all our clients, thus some pictures we take while shooting your property may be added to this library.
2) A new client may prefer photos of a home in the summer when it is winter, or homeowners may not wish to have their home shot again, and the new agent may simply not want to wait for new photos, in which case we will resell the old photos instead of reshooting.
3) It’s simply more efficient. There’s no reason to waste gasoline, time, and effort of a photographer, agent, and home owner to recreate the exact same pictures we already own.
4) A 3rd party such as a stager or builder may wish to have use of the photos.
5) Reselling drone photos is always preferable to reshooting as every drone flight carries a small safety risk.
If you become a regular client, you will almost surely benefit from these policies.