More of The Worst Property Videos Series

Thought I’d continue to share with you some of these little gems that appear on Youtube, proudly displayed by the listing Real Estate Agent. This one is a right little doosy, the property was listed at $17.5 million US and the agency responsible for this one is Hilton Hyland Realty Brokerage.

One of the owners of this agency just happens to be Paris Hilton’s father. At a price tag of $17.5 million, you would have thought the agent could have at least organised a proper video rather than use a slide show. The background music shows a certain flare, although I’m not quite sure what they were trying to achieve, the video is cheap and the agent looks cheap, to me at least.

It really makes you wonder why they bothered.

It’s All About Me in Real Estate Marketing

Ever wondered how the consumer or real estate searcher when searching on your web site or real estate portal views themselves? Am i a lead? a prospect? a contact or am I a person?

How do you approach social media or Internet marketing in general with your real estate office? do you treat them as a lead or a prospect, a contact or a person? 

From the consumers point of view it’s, All about me!!!

Interesting thought starter isn’t it. How you approach your marketing efforts on the web really is about how you view your consumers, how you talk to them, how you respond to them, how you market to them and the words you use are all very, very important when it comes to on line marketing, WHY? because this is usually the first point of contact a consumer will have with you and your business or product, and how well you treat them or engage themwill depend on whether they come back to your web site, use your services or buy your product.

I often get the response from real estate agents when talking about internet marketing and social media of “all I want are leads” or “How many new prospects will I get” .

The buyer/seller will judge you on lots of criteria, including your knowledge of the area, your expertise in marketing and selling property, your negotiating skills etc, so how do you inform them of all your skills and provide them with the information to make the decision to use you or your business. Most real estate agents market for today, and I don’t for one minute suggest you stop that activity, but give some thought to the future and implement a longer term strategy and start to market effectively to the future.

From the real estate portals comes research that indicates up to 39% of the real estate buyer or seller can be researching up to 9 to 12 months on line before buying or selling, so when they do, have you been the one that constantly updates them, provides them with really helpful information on real estate, sells your expertise in the area and have you treated them as a person.

Here’s a really great video for you to watch on this very subject and after you watch it, you may just be tempted to engage your market.

I for one would like to see you do just that.

Property Video Tours – What Not To Do Ever!!!!

Just before Christmas I was visiting an agents office in Perth WA and we got talking about video and how he and his office could use it to market themselves and their clients properties, during the course of the discussion he asked me how professional do the videos have to be. He then mentioned he’d seen my first video attempt and said it wasn’t a very professional video, I told him the video had been done in a hotel room on a web cam at 6:30 in the evening and was more to demonstrate that you can record a video, no matter where you are, host it and then syndicate it. This whole process by the way took me just 5 minutes. That video then has been embedded over a 1000 times and still today comes up in my Google alerts as being continually syndicated.

The main point of my video was to show during my presentations that this was all free and not that difficult to do, so every real estate agent could record and then syndicate their own weekly market updates. But now to the point of this post, over the past few weeks I’ve been doing some research and looking at agent produced videos, not the professional ones but those recorded and hosted by the agents themselves. The results of this search have really just confirmed to me, that most real estate agents are not movie director Ridley Scott and should leave it to the professionals, as the example I’ll show you indictates.

The bottom line on this is that with these new tools becoming available to you, you need to really plan what you will show and how you will provide that information to the viewer. The more amateurish the video is, the more it damages your brand and your reputation, so make sure if you are going to film or video your own property tour that you use some of the following rules or suggestions and do not, at any time, replicate what you see in the video here. My apologies to the original agent on this, but when you see the video you’ll know what I mean.

1. Plan the video and make sure you sequence the shots so the video has a natural feel to it, conduct the open home with a structure. 

2. Plan what features you will highlight in the video before you start to shoot, not during the filming.

3. Write and rehearse the script and then film

4. Wherever possible, use a tripod. Hand held shots and fast panning really are detracting for the viewer, not to mention having them vomit on the computer.   

5. Make sure you light the room or house correctly, identify the areas of the house that need to be lit during filming and use lights.

6. Tidy up the house first, remove any clutter from kitchens or bathrooms or other areas of the house that you will be using to film.

7. Try not to move around to much whilst being filmed, make any on camera appearances smooth, you can still show the house whilst providing the voice over off camera.   

8. If you’re using titles on the video, make sure your spelling is correct, not like the example on this video.

9. Limit the length of the video to 2 minutes, that is about the attention span of the average consumer. 

10. If you are using music as a background make sure you use music that is not copyright or is available for public use, if in doubt don’t use any. If you decide to use background music then please match it to the property. Keep the levels low in the background.

I hope these suggestions will be of value to you and if you get it right, your video will be a pleasure to watch, just check out some of the professionally produced videos to see what I mean. In the meantime, check out probably the worst example of a luxury property video tour I’ve seen. I’ll share more with you over the next few weeks.

Research on the Power of Real Estate Videos

You’ll hear me sprouting about this subject and I’m quite passionate about agents embracing video, see this earlier post: Using Video in Your Real Estate Marketing as an example of this. I’m passionate about agents using video to promote listings, their profile and their offices and as I’ve mentioned before, this is portable content, so you can take a simple video and share it with the world. When you create an account with Youtube for instance, you create a channel, and you can post videos here to share with consumers. Using video in your listing presentation to promote how you market your clients property is also powerful marketing. I receive in my letter box, at least 5 pieces of marketing material each week and all go in my bin, but how about dropping a office profile on DVD in my letter box?, now that would be a point of difference, more importantly share this with me on your own web site.

All of this is of course leading somewhere, and here it is, research now coming out of the US on the growth of video is staggering, so if you ever needed more incentive to start adding video to your listing tools and properties then this is it!!

For example: 134 Million people went on line to watch on average, 81 videos each, from a total of 11 Billion viewed. In figures released from comScore:

• 71% of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video
• The average online viewer watched 228 minutes of video
• 18-34 year olds were the heaviest viewers watching 287 minutes each
• 82.1 million viewers watched 4.1 billion videos on YouTube
  • 49.8 videos per viewer
• 46 million viewers watched 481 million videos on MySpace
  • 10.4 videos per viewer
• The average online video duration was 2.8 minutes

Youtube ranked the highest with 98% of all videos viewed on line.

With these types of numbers starting to impact the habits of consumers, it won’t be long before this starts to impact us here in Australia. So my question to you is, why wait, start to implement this as a strategy for your office and take advantage of what is just around the corner. If you are not sure how to do this and would like some help, then just send me a comment and I’ll answer any question you have on getting this up and running in your business.

Also check out my earlier post about video increasing the perceived property value Property Videos Increase Percieved Property Value  and you can download my podcast on this topic here : http://mikeandrew.podomatic.com/

Property Videos Increase Percieved Property Value

As most of you who have seen my presentations will know, I’m a big fan of video tours on property. Well to back up my passion that this tool should form a mandatory part of your marketing plans, a new survey released in the US has found that online videos and professionally produced photography have on perceived real estate property values.  According to the study, the survey results show that the use of an online video tour in marketing real estate property increased the perceived value of a home by 6%. 

Additionally, users indicated that they would be more likely to actually be interested in and visit homes on the market that had online video or professional photography associated with the listing. Finally, The data also shows that individuals who viewed a video of a property felt the listing would be on the market for a shorter period of time when compared to similar homes.

Survey Results Summary:

• 320 respondents viewed homes in the $400,000-$600,000 range.
• Respondents that viewed listing information accompanied by professional photography valued the property at an average price of $460,735, an increase of 11.5 percent or $52,896 over the average perceived price of the description-only property, $407,839.
• Respondents viewing a video valued the home at an average price of $432,329, an increase of 5.7 percent or $24,490, over the average perceived price of the description-only property, $407,839.
• Survey respondents believed a home with professional photography was three times more likely to sell within the standard listing period than a home marketed with only descriptive information.
• When asked how likely they were to visit the homes listed with professional photography, seven times as many respondents indicated that they were “very likely” to visit the home as those who said they were “very likely” to visit a home with only descriptive information

The research was undertaken by a company called PropertyPreviews in the US.

Remember, video is portable content and can be used on Facebook,Youtube as well as all the main real estate sites, you can also use it in your listing presentations.

As always, any comments or questions, please ask.