Four companies worked on that house. You licensed one of them.
A new-construction house is the work of four or five companies. A developer put the money up, a builder ran the site, an architect drew it, an interior designer specified everything inside it, and a landscape firm did the part that makes the exterior shot work. One of them hired you. All of them want the pictures.
The licensee is a company, not a project
A licence runs to a named party. When your paperwork says the images may be used “for the Ocean Ridge project”, it has not named anyone, and the gap gets filled by whoever is holding the file. The architect forwards the set to the builder, sincerely believing that the licence covers the house rather than the firm, and now a company you never quoted is running your work in its own advertising.
Nobody in that chain is behaving badly. They are reading a document that did not say what it meant. Naming the entity is not a defensive measure, it is the sentence that makes the rest of the agreement mean anything.
So the first change is to the licensee line, and it takes ten seconds: the legal entity, in full, exactly as it signs contracts. “Marlowe and Beck Architects, PLLC” and not “the architect”. If the builder should also have rights, the builder is a second licence, not a wider reading of the first.
Four uses that are genuinely different
The temptation, once you realise a shoot has several buyers, is to write one broad grant and let everyone in. That is the expensive version of the same mistake, because these four are not four copies of one customer.
The architect wants a portfolio and award submissions. Long term, high prestige, low reach, and often no advertising at all.
The builder wants a homepage, a project page and paid social. Commercial, ongoing, regional.
The developer wants sales material for this property and for the next three like it. Short term, high intensity, and it stops when the units sell.
The interior designer wants specific interior frames, not the exteriors, and mostly for editorial submissions and social.
Those are four different products. Priced as one blanket grant, you have quoted the widest use and given away the other three, or quoted the narrowest and undercharged the party who needed the most. Priced separately, the total is higher and every party pays for what they actually do.
The part that changes the economics
Here is the thing worth taking away. A shared shoot is several licences against one production cost, not one licence divided between people.
Your shooting day costs what it costs whether one firm buys it or five do. If you sell it once, that cost sits against one fee. If four firms license the same set, the same day carries four fees, and because each firm’s usage is narrower than a blanket grant would have been, each of them pays less than they would to commission the shoot alone.
That is not a discount. It is the same production spread across the people who were always going to want it. The developer who would have paid $3,000 to own the day outright pays $1,000 for the use they actually need, and three other firms do the same, and you have done one day of work.
Sell it before you take it
Everything above still works after the fact. It works considerably better before.
The parties are all knowable in advance on a new build: they are on the permit, on the site sign, and on each other’s websites. Approaching them before the shoot changes the conversation completely, because you are not asking anyone to pay for photographs that already exist and that they have probably already seen. You are inviting them into a shoot that has not happened, of a project they are proud of, at a fraction of what commissioning it alone would cost.
The practical difference is that the shoot is paid for before you press the shutter, and the awkward follow-up conversation never has to happen. The party who says no has said no to something that cost them nothing, and they usually say yes on the next project.
This is the part Resid was built around. It finds the companies attached to a property, prices each licence on its own usage rather than splitting one number, and collects from each party before the shoot date.
What to do on the next new build
- Write down every company before you quote. Permit records, the site sign, the developer’s own project page. Five minutes, and it is the whole basis for what follows.
- Name the licensee as a legal entity, in full. Not a role, not a project. This is the single most common gap in architectural paperwork and it costs nothing to close.
- Quote each party for their own usage. Media, placement, term, territory. Four narrow licences beat one wide one for you and for them.
- Invite them in before the shoot. A cost that is shared is an easier yes than a cost that is sunk, and you find out who is in before you commit the day.
- Say plainly that a licence is not transferable. One line. It prevents the forward that everyone makes innocently and nobody can undo.
Where this fits
This is drawn from the field guide, which covers what a licence must name, what the building’s own copyright does and does not protect, what sits in the frame that is not yours, releases, drone rules, AI training clauses, registration, and how usage actually prices.
Read what a licence must name, how usage prices, licensing to the manufacturers whose products are in the room, or all 54 rules.
Every rule here is a decision Resid makes for you.
It finds the companies who worked on a property, prices each licence on real licensing data, writes the agreement, and collects.
See how it works →