This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):
Video has a place in home sales, but use it wisely
This is purported to be the year of the listing video, but I am not hugely in love with the idea of video tours. I think digital photos do a much better job of selling buyers on the home. Why? Because they’re bigger. Brighter. Of much higher resolution. And because they hold still.
Video has age-of-wonders appeal to everyone, but if buyers want to get to know a house, they are going to study it. Even if online video overcame its muddy, fleeting quality, it would still be a poor medium for touring a home.
There’s more. Realtor-produced videos often have an amateurish quality that is hard to endure: “This. Is. The. Formal. Dining. Room. The. Residents. Dine. In. This. Room.” Even if the performance is sprightlier, the presentation is often an elaboration of the obvious.
But I do want to tap into that age-of-wonders appeal, and we always want to do more for our listings than our competitors can match. And if I can soak up a potential buyer’s time, that’s time that won’t be deployed looking at other houses. The point is, there are good competitive reasons for including a video tour with a real estate listing, even if video competes poorly with photography.
What I’ve been looking for is a video format that makes sense in the context of the listing — video doing a job that photography cannot do, rather than video doing photography’s job badly.
Here’s what I came up with: An interview with the seller. The particular home we tried this on is an extensive restoration. Taking the seller through the house room by room to talk about what was refurbished, what was remodeled, what was created from scratch was a way of turning video into a true asset in the listing package.
This works much better for me, in any case. We’re not depending on the video for high-resolution images, and we are able to take on the story behind the listing in a way that is both compelling and uniquely suited to video as a communications medium.
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Sock Puppet says:
I think the crux of the matter is TV as a medium, or perhaps us as an audience, is/are really tuned to focusing on people. I always end up watching the realtor rather than the home, or get slightly irked that the realtor is a voice over and not getting to see them.
Photos seem better balanced between “hey look a person” and “hey look an object”.
Plus it’s way, way, harder to photoshop people…
-Athol
May 11, 2007 — 3:31 pm