What happens when you look at a real estate listing of a neighbors home on an online site that uses drone made videos and find your entire yard, home and property are online? What if it’s close enough they can see inside your home? What if you have something in your yard you don’t want anyone to see?  Do you have any privacy rights?

I got the idea for this poll when it happened to someone I know.  They were looking at a neighboring house for sale on a real estate site and found a video, so they watched it.  It was a slow sweep over surrounding homes and they saw their back yard, and everything they had in their yard on the Internet.  They were very upset and had no recourse. 

What is someone had a tall fence built so they could sunbathe in the nude? Eeek!

Supposedly images of people and animals must be blurred, but that is only on Google earth and similar.  They could easily put a nude sunbather on a real estate site if they were sloppy and did not alter the footage.

LOL. Yes, sloppiness is always turning up on the internet.

I was a real estate broker for about 30 years (before drones were popular) and online property listings with videos have become common and aerial drone shots are just another promotional tool.

But with most promotional efforts it is best to get permission of the seller.

Are they required to by law? If not, they won’t.

Neighbors of the for sale property being videoed have privacy concerns about their yards being viewed but hopefully realtors will avoid including people.

It is a long-standing tradition to include comps and neighborhood info in listings as part of the location, location, location sales pitch.

In Texas a real estate company must have signed permission to before placing a sign in a person's yard but I am not aware of limits on drone videos.

 

That’s very nice and you proved my point. The properties are very isolated with a lot of space around the homes except in one case where I noticed other houses. The same kind of shot in a suburban area would show the yards of dozens of homes.  It’s almost worse in a more isolated area where surrounding neighbors may have good reasons to want privacy.  It seems very invasive to me.