Next month, I’ll be speaking at RE Blogworld. I’ll be speaking with Mike Price and Morgan Brown about using video in your real estate business. As most of you know, I do quite a bit of video here on the blog, but the way I use here it isn’t necessarily the same way I would use it in my real estate business.
One question I get from folks is, “how can I use video?” Well, the first thing I would say is– Don’t do video tours of your listings unless you are getting a professional to put it together. We tried doing our own listing tours in our brokerage, and it was a colossal waste of time and effort. The folks at REShows and MLBroadcast are able to put together a much better presentation of your listing using photos and music than you are able to make with video (unless you are a videographer).
So, if I shouldn’t do listing tours, what should I do?
Well, for starters, video is a great way to show people what a neighborhood is like. People can see houses through photos. Neighborhoods and points of interest are much more difficult, and you don’t usually find pictures of that type of thing in the MLS. Video might be perfect for showing folks around town.
Another great use of video is to expose people to the flavor of the area. When you are out and about going to community events, shoot some video. Give people a taste of what it is like to actually LIVE somewhere. People don’t just move into a house and become hermits. They move in and go to restaurants, they go to malls, they go to community events, they go to fairs. . .
My Example
Here is a little video I put together after our trip to the local Albemarle County fair. I took video, and I took a bunch of pictures. I put it to some music, and VOILA! We now have a video that we can share with customers and clients that shows them what the fair was like (and it also gives them a taste of the area):
From the time I sat down at the computer until I had a finished video, it took just over 1 hour. I try to shoot the type of video that doesn’t require a whole lot of editing. Keep it simple– that helps. It actually took longer to get the pictures ready than it did to get the video together. The end result is about 2 minutes long. I think that should be your target end time for just about anything you do. Going much longer than that can be tough on folks, unless it is really interesting.
So that’s just one example of how you might want to use video in your real estate business. There are plenty of others, and I hope to be able to share more examples of things we are doing in the future. If you have your own examples, or examples from others, let me know, I would love to share them with everyone!
