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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RealLiving hooked up with MLPodcast today to provide video podcasting services to all of its agents. (You can read the full release at Mike’s Corner).

Coincidentally, Realtor Magazine also named video or video podcasts as one of their hot marketing trends in their 2007 List Issue which came out today.

Finally, the idea must be gaining steam if you even have mainstream tech columnists weighing in on the matter too.

I think it’s important to separate the two ideas however, as I’ve seen the two terms used interchangeably. And I think we should differentiate whether we are talking about simply posting a video on the Internet (for more on how, see Video Hosting Alternatives to Youtube) or true video podcasts; that is, video content that can be subscribed to or delivered automatically through syndication.

It seems to me that the two, while similar, have very different applications.

There’s no doubt, video by itself has many uses in real estate marketing.

• It could be used to describe your company or product. I love the way BlueRoof.com does this, for example.
• It could be used to profile a neighborhood or add context to a community site. Turnhere does this well.
• It can be used to highlight the selling features of a particular property. (see WellcomeMat – The Killer App for Real Estate Video)
• It can be used to create compelling content that can drive traffic to your site. (see Sitcom Used to Sell Condos)

Video podcasting, on the other hand, is a slightly different animal. The biggest difference, for me anyway, is that it is content that should be delivered and/or received regularly.

It seems to me that uses for video podcasting in real estate marketing are a little more limited right now. Off the top of my head…

• You could subscribe to an individual agent’s new listings. This would be far more relevant if it could deliver video results of a customized property search – a virtual ‘video river’ of all an agent’s or broker’s listings would quickly become annoying.
• Receive monthly/quarterly video market trend reports from an agent. I get real nervous about this one. Honestly, if there’s anything worse than a badly written blog, it’s a poorly produced podcast. I can imagine a lot of boring “talking heads”. I think anyone trying to go down this road is going to have a hard time; unless they adopt a more creative production style like other successful video podcasts like Rocketboom, the show with zefrank or Look Shiny. (Now there’s an idea!)
• I love Greg’s idea to use video podcasts to market a property on a mobile phone (make sure to read through the comments on his post on how this could be accomplished). But I think we’re definitely a few years away from that. I’ve tried Podcast Ready on my BlackJack and it’s like pulling teeth trying to get it download anything.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that 2007 will be the year of video. Video podcasting, I think, may have to wait.

Am I missing something here?

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