Foxtons Does Automated Vodcasts
What I love about blogging is sometimes the real gems I find come from the comments readers place on my posts.
In my recent post on video podcasting, I speculated how a raw “video river” of a broker’s or agent’s listings doesn’t really serve consumer’s needs very well and that for video podcasting (’vodcasting’) to be an effective way of delivering listings, there needs to be a way to filter those results by neighborhood or through a customized property search.
Sure enough, someone’s already doing it.
Foxtons, an estate agency based in the U.K. that’s already on the cutting edge of real estate marketing, are now delivering web feeds of properties for sale in London and Surrey from Foxtons estate agents.
Using their site, home buyers can filter all their listings by area and price range and subscribe to an XML feed of the results - but here’s the kicker. You can choose if you want to receive text, audio and even video versions of the listings to appear in your news reader.
What’s neat is how they do this. The podcasts or vodcasts are dynamically generated for every listing in Foxtons’ inventory. The video is a slide show of the property photos and the audio is just the listing description read by computer voice generation software.
Check out this example of properties in Surrey up to £250,000.
The videos don’t have the impact of a true video walkthru - but being that it’s automatically created, I guess you can’t really complain. Overall, it’s been a pretty successful approach for Foxtons. According to the comment the video versions are 4x more popular than the audio versions, which doesn’t really surprise me. I’m not sure I could listen to that computer voice for very long without the accompanying visuals.
Which brings me to the only other weird thing I found with this setup. Listening to British property descriptions being read in an American accent. Seemed a little out of wack to me.
This approach is definitely bleeding edge stuff. But a good example of how, with some creativity, you can push the marketing envelope a little bit. Anyone State-side thinking of doing this?
Will we be seeing this feature on Foxtons USA soon?
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Incredible Agent | Mar 7, 2007 | Reply
I don’t think this would be too hard to do. All you would need is a simple script to pull the images into a flash file and then podcast the descriptive text over it. The technology obviously exists, someone just needs to make it easier for people to do. Maybe the WellcomeMat guys can get on that. They seem to have a good grasp of flash and would probably be able to whip this out in a short amount of time.
The Foxton’s clips were very interesting. It was a good use of existing technologies to get the job done. I don’t like their use of quicktime though.
Chris | Mar 7, 2007 | Reply
Foxtons is know for many techie things, and yet they seem to be losing money instead of making it. Listening to that computer generated voice is just as engaging as calling a credit card customer service and talking back to a machine. Somethings are just better when done by humans.
Oh, and if you’d like your video tour with a British accent, check out the samples at viewrealestate.tv - for mere $499…
John Schroeder | Mar 7, 2007 | Reply
I agree with everyone it that the computer generated voice is awful. And I thought the same people’s voice over and over on the local cable channel was mind numbing. There is a definite connection when you can see and hear the actual agent. And you guys thought computers could do everything.
I do hope that someone comes out with a useable format stateside. Though having an exclusive channel-YOUR BLOG to your prospects is nice too.
Leo | Mar 8, 2007 | Reply
A couple of points on the feedback above…
We (Foxtons) have a flash version on the website (see ‘Audioshow’) for each property; the version in the feeds have to be in quicktime for vodcasts - so it works with iTunes and iPods.
Because of the number of properties we add each week (up to 1,000) it is impossible for us to manually create the audio. We create the mp3 for every property, sales or lettings, and they automatically update if there is a price change or an addition to the description.
We tried many different voices, originally we wanted a male and female with British accents; but the American accent was far easier to understand. If a better voice becomes available we will of course switch.
AJ | Mar 8, 2007 | Reply
Interesting what this potentially means for the business model around photo-based virtual tours.
Christian Sterner | Mar 8, 2007 | Reply
Incredible Agent,
Thanks for the vote of confidence, but Phil is the only voice enabled robot we have, and he is too busy for voice overs. Foxtons nailed it with this one, and in dealing with what is readily available to come up with something podcastable, the description audio is spot on (regardless of how it sounds). Annoying…maybe; but I have to admit that they did the best they could, and succeeded. Hats off to them.
Is there a business model for someone that wants to do voice overs of real estate listings all day long? I think the indisputable answer is “YES!”
Leo | May 10, 2007 | Reply
Foxtons have now launched the videos for all US homes listed directly with the company.
More details here:
http://www.foxtons.com/news/