Youtube is simply a MUST in video marketing. Anything else is nice, but not necessary (my company uploads all videos to almost 2 dozen sites, both real estate and plain old video sites, everything linking back to the agent and/or my website).

Sandy

Thanks.
P.

Bob

“The sellers who don’t have a video of their property may easily be left off of a buyers’ list of homes to consider much like most buyers today skip over properties without pictures or a virtual tour.”

I would tend to agree with these comments … except that over 10 years, I’ve seen the so-called popularity – and the price – of virtual tours drop tremendously. The trend has gone from professionally produced tours – in which we’ll include “the future of real estate videos” – toward flash slideshows with music in the background, as many as you want for $30 per month.

Why? Because while “Americans are very convenience driven,” many agents – the majority of whom make only about $40K/year – are very price driven. If they don’t want to pay $100 for a full 360×360° virtual tour and think slide shows take the place of them, they’re unlikely to want to pay $200 or more for a video simply because it’s “cool.”

Likewise, I don’t foresee an awful lot of videographers wanting to travel across town to a $2 million property (in some areas, that’s a LARGE home!) to get paid $50 for their trouble, not to mention their talent!

A local (Top 20) newspaper has been offering a professional video package as an enhancement to its online real estate listings. While it’s pricey (about $1K when all is said and done), it has not been popular except to builders and a small handful of high-end resale properties.

This is where I get to put in a plug, too: although it is a far cry from a professional video and much closer to the slideshows I’ve decried, its advantages are that it’s totally automated, very, very inexpensive, and can be used on every listing on a website, including cooperating brokers’.

Here is a sample over a JPEG screen shot; viewing the source shows how easy it is to implement on a web page. The verbiage is translated into conversational English directly from MLS (or other) data, no user intervention involved once the schema is set up.

It is a true video format, meaning that it can be published directly to YouTube and similar sites: a sample, and of course, keyworded to be picked up by Google.

Imagine driving by a home and seeing a sign rider: “Google this address for a video tour.” You pull over and pull up the video on your iPhone, see the agent’s phone number, decide you like the house, and call for a showing. They you wait for the agent to show up.

While video purists might have issues with this being (or not being) a “video” in their eyes, tell me where else anyone can populate their entire website with these productions for well under a buck apiece!

… Which will be “too much money” for some people!