I haven’t talked about video for a while because we haven’t been doing very much with it.
That’s not completely true. We use the Flip digital video camera to share notes with clients fairly frequently.
But as I have discussed at length in the past, I have no use whatever for the typical Lurch-takes-a-home-tour style of real estate video. I see it as being anti-marketing, worse than doing nothing at all.
For video to work, there has to be a story, and I can only think of two stories that make sense in the context of listing a home.
The first is simply an interview with the sellers, and we have done this on other homes. The second is the documentary, an illustrated narrative about some aspect of the home or the neighborhood. An example of this would be a slow drive-by of the structures in the neighborhood with a voice-over narrative telling the tale, whatever it is.
Arguably, you could impose a fictional or farcical story on the home, but this strikes me as being simultaneously too familiar and too stoopid by half.
The population of pundits who don’t actually sell real estate is rife with people who swear that video is the wave of the future. But, even with a plausible and endurable story, video has other drawbacks. It can be a real bear to edit, both labor- and computer-intensive. The down-sampling necessary to make it work on web sites robs images of their detail. Moreover, real estate photography wants very wide-angle lenses — which make people look fat and exaggerate foreground-to-background distances.
The solution I’ve arrived it, for now, is to superimpose still images over the video. Talking heads are boring, but we can use stills to illustrate what they are talking about, lending visual interest to the total package.
Here’s an example, as processed through YouTube:
You can see a better example of that video on the video page for 56 West Willetta Street.
The video scene was shot with the Flip camera. The native AVI file was converted to NTSC video, which is native food for Apple’s Final Cut. The photos were just dragged and dropped from 640×480 images. The finished MOV file was re-rendered as an MP4 to make it small and tight for the web.
My opinion is that this does a better job of selling the home that a Lurch-tour, and the combination of tools made it fairly easy to edit.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, real estate photography, real estate training, technology
Brian Brady says:
Three comments:
1- Cathy should interview EVERYBODY; her tone is perfect for this sort of interview.
2- This home oozes with pride of ownership
3- The baby crying on cue made for a homey touch.
Bravo, Maestro!
October 14, 2008 — 10:13 pm
Sean Purcell says:
Greg,
You are, as usual, light years ahead of me. I have yet to experiment with video but this is a real kick in the pants to get going.
I have been considering the idea of using video to interview neighbors, local business owners of note (restaurants, little league coaches if it is a family neighborhood) even a councilman. I imagine it being a sticky version of testimonial for the home and it’s surroundings. What are your thoughts?
October 14, 2008 — 11:14 pm
Greg Swann says:
> I have been considering the idea of using video to interview neighbors, local business owners of note (restaurants, little league coaches if it is a family neighborhood) even a councilman. I imagine it being a sticky version of testimonial for the home and it’s surroundings.
Indeed. That’s another way of doing the second story, the documentary. You can take all those clips and knit them together, then use either stills or other clips with the voices under to add interest. It’s powerful stuff because your prospects will trust third-party testimony more than any claims you might make.
October 14, 2008 — 11:31 pm
Alexandria real estate says:
this is an excellent video and I learned a lot from it. I’ve tried to do re video before and I can see how lame it was:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3wgkbEMciA
The idea of the owner listing/explaining the improvements on the home–especially if they have to do with the quality of construction–is rad!
jay
October 15, 2008 — 6:25 am
Cheryl Johnson says:
Nice job!!
But I wonder how many potential clients really watch a whole video start to finish. When I’m searching the web for info, I know very rarely watch any videos I find all the way through. Maybe that’s just me.
October 15, 2008 — 6:36 am
J Boyer Summit NJ says:
It is a really good idea, but I could not sit thought the video. The standard videos you see these days are just so boring.
October 15, 2008 — 2:16 pm
Daniel, The Real Estate Zebra says:
Every time I have been asked to talk with folks about video recently, the very first thing I say is DON’T DO LISTING VIDEOS. As bad as the average sample of listing photos can be, the last thing the world needs is a flood of crappy listing videos. Bad video is painful.
We did the exact same thing you did with your video a few months ago (ours was a bit more crude, as we didn’t have the editing tools that we do now). People seemed to respond more to the interview with the sellers, and sellers always like to talk about their home. I still think that the overall costs involved with creating the video (mostly TIME), doesn’t seem to outweigh the value of the video. Listings are best displayed through photos. Arranging those photos in a slide show is great, but video for listings is largely a waste.
The other thing I have found is that if you are going to spend the time and effort to create your own videos, it is in your best interest to create videos that contain as much “evergreen” content as possible. Your listing will be sold (hopefully) in a few weeks. Spending two hours to create a video for it– not such a good idea. Neighborhoods change on a far less frequent scale, so spending time to create a video about a neighborhood is a better allocation of resources. The same could be said for videos about area attractions or community resources.
October 15, 2008 — 3:40 pm
Karen Rice says:
I love this and would like to try something like this with my sellers for one of my listings – he loves to talk about his house.
October 15, 2008 — 4:19 pm