How to Make Extra Money as a Field Agent | The Ultimate Guide

Like most individuals, there came a point in my life where I was seeking ways to make extra money – sometimes to save up for a vacation, sometimes to make Christmas a little bit less stressful, and sometimes just to help make ends meet. As I began looking for methods to make money on the side, I found many opportunities, but with a full time job, a business I was hoping to grow on the side, and a family to balance, much of the gig economy just didn’t fit well into my lifestyle.

In the gig economy, ride sharing and delivery apps were the primary ways people made money on the side, but they often required a relatively lengthy investment of time and the resulting income was often hit or miss. So you would sit around for an hour hoping you’d score a few deliveries and if a few popped up you were able to accept, there was an immediate sense of urgency to reach the destination and perform the job. So half the time was spent sitting in the driver’s seat of the car with finger’s crossed you’d get a delivery alert and the other half the time was hurrying around with finger’s crossed all a tip would be left on the order to justify your time.

And while it’s better than sitting on a computer filling out surveys for hours in hopes of getting a couple bucks (you probably can’t even cash out until you hit a threshold), it really isn’t ideal for someone who wants to make the most of their time.

As I spent more and more time researching money making opportunities, I eventually came across Field Agent work and found it to be the perfect way to make extra income.

It fits well into a busy schedule.

It doesn’t require any skills.

And the pay is justifiable for the amount of time you spend doing it – in fact, the pay can be really good.

My objective with this guide is to teach you as much as I can about becoming a field agent, what it is, and why you might want to in hopes to empower others to find the same success doing it as I did. I know there are lots of people out there looking for ways to provide for their family or go the extra mile, and this

What is Field Agent work?

As the name might imply, Field Agents work “in the field” – i.e. at a certain location or address and then they perform a certain job at that address. The type of jobs you perform vary quite a bit, but they all essentially consist of getting eyes on an asset or location and providing information on it to the entity requesting the information. You might also see these referred to as inspections, so Field Inspections is also a good search term to use synonymously in the industry to find opportunities, but I feel like the types of inspections that are requested are more on par with “observing” something rather than “inspecting” something.

For example, an insurance company might hire a field agent to visit a customer’s address and take photos of a damaged vehicle. So they’ll provide a list of photos they’d like you to take and the extent of the inspection is being able to identify the point of impact and point the camera at it. While some field agents might be third party insurance adjusters and have more opportunities because of it, most of the time these auto inspections don’t require any special knowledge at all. You don’t have to know how the accident happened, you don’t have to know the extent of the damage, what it will take to repair it, what it will cost, or anything more than just showing up and taking photos.

That’s why I feel the term Field Agent is a much better catch all for the types of jobs that you’ll be asked to do outside the umbrella of “inspection” type work.

Companies use Field Agents as a cost effective way to spread out their ability to review, audit, or get near real-time information about the current condition of something. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to pay for an employee on staff at these companies to travel to a location, especially if the job doesn’t require specialized skills to do it, and so these companies can just reach out to a Field Inspection agency to find a local independent contractor to perform the inspection for a fraction of the cost.

What type of companies hire Field Agents?

Field agents are commonly used by the insurance industry, lenders and mortgage companies, real estate investment businesses, and corporations with multiple locations, though really anyone looking for on site access to a remote location might use these services.

Insurance companies often want to get information about vehicles or properties involved insurance claims. I’ve also had a couple of times where I’ve been asked to visit intersections on behalf of lawyers who are debating the blame of an incident, requesting me to take photos of signage, note the pattern of a stop light, and detail the area the accident occurred.

Mortgage companies are often looking to get a recent snapshot of a property, along with some photos for their reports, when putting together a refinance package or in the case their borrower has started to default, request a field agent to deliver notices or verify occupancy status. In that same vein, I’ve also been hired as a Field Agent to visit an address and check whether a certain vehicle exists at it. Sometimes that will include posting a notice to their door and so you’ll be involved with the very, very early parts of preparing for the company to repossess the vehicle.

Landlords that live out of state might want to get a property condition report, consumer goods companies might want data about how their products are displayed on store shelves, and grocery store chains might want a few photos of the overall condition of their parking lot to make sure employees at a location a distance from headquarters is doing their job to maintain the property between times that corporate visits.

How much can you make as a Field Agent?

Field Agent jobs are typically posted at a fixed rate somewhere in the neighborhood of $12 to $20 per job, though there are outliers that pay higher and there are certainly jobs you’ll be asked to do that pay lower. Most of these jobs only take 5 to 10 minutes to complete, so when you extrapolate that out, that’s actually pretty high hourly pay. Typically, I can schedule a handful of these jobs each week, so on the lower end I’d say I average $50 or so in a week and on a week with higher volume I can make somewhere around $100.

Lately, I’ve been averaging somewhere between $250 and $300 in revenue from available assignments. I probably could have made a bit more, but I ignore some available assignments depending on my schedule, because I balance it with a full time job and small business.

Since assignments are a fixed rate, you do have to factor in the cost and time of travel, but if you can find opportunities close to where you live or work, taking a detour can quickly add up. And sometimes, I’ll string together a number of assignments all on a route I can complete in a couple hours and go outside my normal zone if it makes sense for the amount of money I can make from the multiple field agent jobs I’ve got in my queue.

I hesitate to suggest this could be full time income, not because I don’t think it’s possible, it just hasn’t been evident to me in my area that it would be and it certainly wouldn’t replace my full time income in my current career. I think it’s possible given a person has a fuel efficient enough vehicle, the time available to perform several of these in a day, and lives in an area where there’s a high enough volume of available assignments each week that a person could make a living doing it, but I can’t really comment on what that living would look like. I don’t think you can expect to get rich, but I can definitely say with enough effort you can make a car payment each month or make a dent in your rent from field agent work.

What are the pros and cons of Field Agent work?

As I mentioned, rate of pay is huge positive for this line of work, at least compared to other options in the gig economy. It’d be easy to sensationalize it by saying you can make $80 an hour, and I suppose on a few occasions I’ve been able to do nearly that by completing 4 assignments in the same area for $20 a piece. More often than not, I tend to pick up jobs that exist in a triangular area between my work and my home and the town my daughters live and it’s a great way to make an extra $20 to $30 here or there throughout the week by simply making a quick 10 minute detour from my normal travelling path.

I think people could probably make similar rates of pay (if not more overall) in other gig economy jobs, like ride sharing, but there’s a lot of down time and waiting associated with those. But I’d be hard pressed to believe the investment of time for that income exceeds field agent work. Most of the time, completing an assignment is as simple as pulling up to the property, taking a photo of the front as you walk up to it, taking a photo of the house number for verification, and maybe a couple more photos before hopping back in the vehicle to pull away. I’ve pulled up to a house, realized the required asset wasn’t even there, taken a photo for proof I showed up and left in a matter of 2 minutes and still collected the $15 assignment fee more times than I can count.

That brings us to the next benefit. Typically the window of completion is pretty large, so you’ll have a few days (or at least a few hours depending on the app) before the deadline of completion. So you can collect a number of assignments in advance and if you want to wait a day or two until it’s more convenient to do them, that tends to be perfectly okay and customer support is generally pretty supportive if something pops up that requires pushing something a day or two passed deadline.

Another positive aspect to this is that it doesn’t require any special skills. Some of the apps will have areas where you can input additional skills or certifications that open you up to other (sometimes better paying) opportunities, but they aren’t required. These types of things might be licensed drone pilot or public notaries, giving you access to assignments that require them, but for the most part, just being able to drive to a location and whip out your phone is enough to qualify you.

And lastly, at least for certain types of jobs available, you can get free products via Field Agent mystery shopping or review requests from companies. That’s pretty cool in my opinion, especially if you’re getting paid on top of the free product.

That all sounds pretty amazing, but there’s a handful of negatives that are worth mentioning.

First is that all of the jobs tend to be fixed rates of pay, so you definitely need to do some mental math on whether it will be worth it to perform a field agent assignment. If you’re going to get paid $20 for a 10 minute assignment, that sounds pretty good; however, if it takes 45 minutes to drive there and another 45 minutes to drive back, that’s really going to minimize the rate of pay on an hourly basis, not to mention the fuel costs associated with it.

That’s pretty easy to avoid, so it’s not a huge negative, but it’s something to consider.

A more reasonable con would be that sometimes you can be dealing with unruly neighbors or unhappy individuals. Often, I’m in and out of a neighborhood quick enough that no one notices or if they do they don’t bring it to my attention, there’s been a number of times I’ve been approached by a neighbor wondering what I’m doing snooping around a property and taking photos of their street. Dealing with them is typically as easy as an explanation, but if you show up to a property to take photos of a car that’s behind on payments on behalf of a bank, that can insight a lot of frustration for the owner.

It’s not uncommon to be asked to deliver a notice much like a process server, and so handing someone a letter detailing their need to contact their mortgage company can come with unexpected results. They’re going to be agitated, they could become angry and they could take it out on you.

If nothing else, it can make for awkward encounters. There’s been a couple of times where I’ve had to take images of an intersection where an accident happened, photographing signage and it can be uncomfortable walking around seemingly taking photos of cars sitting at the intersection. One one occasion, I was stopped by an officer asking why I was randomly taking photos around an area, and it wasn’t a big deal and I was able to continue, but it’s just an awkward experience at times.

Where does someone find Field Agent work?

You’ll want to sign up as an independent contractor with a Field Agent or Field Inspection agency. You can find some of these on this website.

Companies like WeGoLook, Sand Castle Field Services, and Field Agent are all good options, and it’s a good idea to be a user of all of them because you can increase the likelihood of finding assignments to do.

Each of the apps seems to fit a general type of work, but there’s also a lot of cross over. For example, in my area at least, WeGoLook tends to work a lot with insurance companies and mortgage companies, whereas Sand Castle tends to work with lenders needing to reach out to defaulting borrowers. And Field Agent tends to work with consumer manufacturers interested in getting data about how their products are displayed.

Your experience might differ, because this is so reliant on location, but by joining all of them, you can get a wide variety of job types and sign up for several to do in the same block of time.

What things will most affect my success as a Field Agent?

Probably, the number one thing will be your fuel efficiency. Because the available jobs can be scheduled more often than not at your leisure, the biggest defining factor on whether it’s worth the time to complete an assignment will be the distance it takes to get there. If you’re driving something that gets 30mpg, you might feel compelled to travel 30 miles away for a few jobs paying $12, but if you’re getting 15mpg you could and your fuel cost is going to eat up the bulk of your income on those same jobs, it might not make sense.

The other thing you’ll want to do is routinely check the apps and see if there are available assignments. Some of the apps will send out notifications or emails listing available field agent jobs, but sometimes these aren’t sent out until well after a job is posted and has gone unassigned. So, my assumption is that upon sending out these notifications, there’s a mad rush to open the app by everyone in the vicinity that received it to accept, so you’re better off just opening the websites/apps a few times throughout the day.

On the flip side, as you spend more time in the industry and familiarize yourself with the different apps, you can start to get a feel for locations where there must be thin or non-existent field agent presence. WeGoLook for example will start to increase the payment on some of their jobs every hour or some other metric of frequency. A lot of times, once I’ve gotten a feel for areas I think are unlikely to be accepted, I’ll ignore new postings until I see the fee get into a range I’m willing to accept. Admittedly, this is a bit of gamble, because as I mentioned, they’ll start to email blast assignments in hopes to get an agent’s attention, but there’s a few towns about an hour away that often crawl up into the $50 to $60 range on automotive inspections after they sit with acceptance. If I can be a little patient, I can usually hold off on accepting those until I can link that order up with another one along the way that can cover my gas. It’s hard for me to cover those types of assignments during the week, but I’m not opposed to a road trip during the weekend to snag a quick $60 in a half hour and see some new areas of the state.

One thing I do is I have a spreadsheet where I calculate the cost per mile based upon my average fuel efficiency and the cost of gas. I add in a bit of buffer (about 35% of markup) on this to cover my wear and tear and then I input the total round trip mileage of assignments along with their rates of pay to calculate my earnings. This is helpful, especially for orders that are a long distance away, because I can really narrow down whether it will be worth my time or now. Most of the time, if I can put all my deadlines onto the same day and I can put a handful of orders together in a trip, I can make considerably more than if I just sporadically do them one at a time or ignore them altogether because they’re so far away. So it’s definitely worth doing some planning to take on further assignments if you really want to boost your earnings.

That said, especially with orders that are going to be 1 or 2 hours round trip, I’d highly recommend doing a call ahead in the event it’s an automotive inspection or something that requires the contact to be on site to make sure they’re still planning on being available. If you show up and can’t complete the job, you might get half the rate (maybe), but that can really feel like a waste of time and depending upon your fuel efficiency, potentially turn into a loss if you show up and can’t complete the job. And usually, even if the field agent company you’re working for will comp you partially for making the trip, they usually require you to make a return trip to make the actual full payment.

Another way to boost your earnings is to negotiate your rate. WeGoLook and Sand Castle Field Agent will both send out notices when they’re desperate for an assignment to be filled. A lot of times, you can negotiate a rate $5 to $10 higher than what the posted rate is. With Sand Castle, you actually have the option of requesting an assignment by filling out a form on the assignment page asking for your preferred payment and deadline.

And of course, another way to increase your potential earnings is to get specialized credentials such as notary certification. To be completely honest, since becoming a field agent, I’ve only had one notary job requested on behalf of an insurance company, but it did pay $75 so it was well worth the hassle and covered my notary filing fee for 3 years.

What are some helpful tools a Field Agent should have?

Once I became pretty serious about this upon seeing some significant income, I invested in a little toolbox I put all of my field agent supplies in. There really isn’t much you’ll need other than a cell phone and a vehicle, but some of the apps offer vehicle inspections where some additional tools might be necessary.

I recommend at the very minimum to have a yard stick, tape measure, and tire tread gauge. Your usage of those items shouldn’t see much abuse, so I wouldn’t recommend spending much money and just get something reasonable that doesn’t break the bank. I also keep a roll of tape and manila envelopes with a pen in it as well for assignments that require posting notices.

Some other things you’re going to want to consider aren’t physical tools, but tools in the form of apps.

Since fuel efficiency plays a huge role in earnings, I recommend finding an app that automatically finds the most fuel efficient route and orders addresses automatically for you once you input all of them. I also highly recommend taking advantage of apps that keep track of your mileage and other similar deductions you can use at tax time, since you’re working as an independent contractor. And while definitely not necessary, I’m a huge fan of using a dedicated bank account specifically for my Field Agent earnings as a way of compartmentalizing my income and expenses related to it.

What do Field Agents wear?

Most of the field agent apps will request that you wear something professional looking. I recommend going with something that’s business casual and retains functionality in a variety of weather conditions. Keep in mind, there’s going to be times you’re asked to perform a property inspection that might require walking around a yard that’s been left to the elements and could be muddy. Not to mention, while brief, you might find yourself out in the elements, so always be sure to plan accordingly.

Alright, what now?

So, you’ve read all about what it takes to be a field agent and you’re ready to take the leap and get your first pay day from this industry. The first thing you should do is go check out some field agent app reviews to find an app you’d like to get started on. Then head on over the forum community and get involved to learn even more and share in the experiences of others in the “field” with you!