If A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words, A Video Must Be Worth a Million
categories: Alpharetta Real Estate, Listings
Pictures are not enough and virtual tours are terrible.
First, Pictures:
My grandfather was fond of saying: "Pictures are easily made." And he lived BP, Before Photoshop.
Such was the wisdom of a west Tennessee farmer, but it rings so true of people’s skepticism of marketing and advertising. No one wants to be tricked into buying anything and advertisers are the worst at making something look better than it actually is. Think picture on the cover of a frozen dinner.
I have edited my fair share of pictures, lightening, brightening, cropping, colorizing, adding contrast. I’ve always tried to make my real estate pictures make the house show better, rather than outright deceive. I’ve equated photo editing to staging a house: you are only trying to make it show as well as possible. It is no different than cleaning up and putting some perfume for a date. I’ve never, for instance, photoshopped away power lines or the neighboring house.
But people love pictures even if they can be deceiving, probably because most of use are dominantly visual - and lazy. Why does everyone go see the movie but relatively few read the book?
With the advent of online everything, real estate also leans heavily on "the picture." Experts maintain that the main picture of a house, particularly a luxury house, is the single most important marketing asset (although I would argue price is ;->). Buyers are online and they are looking at pictures. First MLS in Atlanta finally just increased (from eight) the number of pictures you can have for a listing to twelve. In today’s real estate industry, the mantra is: More pictures; more pictures. More pictures online equals more page views, and by inference more sales, although I’m skeptical. Anyway, this presumed causality is what Realtor-dot-com wants agents to believe in order to pimp their "enhanced products" and what the buying and selling public seem to demand.
So, give the people what they want! Enter virtual tours.
I’ve always hated virtual tours and never really thought they were "tours" anyway. Rather, they are just slideshows of still photographs set to much with fancy transitions added between the pictures.
But the point is that you get MORE pictures to look at, it gets around the limitations of some MLS data structures and it was a way for more vendors to make money off realtors. Plus, listing agents now had another useless service to offer sellers in order to justify their commission ;->.
What is the best way, then, to really communicate to buyers the benefits of a property listed for sale? How can you show - I don’t believe that people will read long enough for you to tell them - buyers the property in context? What is the neighborhood like? What does the view look like from the kitchen window? How far are the kids rooms from the master bedroom? How does it compare to other similar properties?
Welcome the video tour.
I read a lot about marketing, real estate and real estate technology. A site like BloodhoundBlog is chalk full of useful real estate marketing ideas. I’ve implemented many ideas that I’ve read about, including this very blog, which I started in 2006. The latest idea that I’m implementing is the video home tour.
I’ve started doing these this year because I’m sold on the power of video and enough people have the bandwidth to handle it. In fact, I’ve started an entire new website dedicated to video home tours in the North Fulton (Alpharetta, Roswell, Milton and Johns Creek) area. Check out www.AlpharettaRealEstate.tv to see my progress. Plus, I’m loading my videos on youTube so they get syndicated around the web. I want to be known as That Video Tour Guy for Alpharetta real estate.
These are not professionally polished videos. Just the opposite; this is homemade North Georgia moonshine. It is just me walking through a house with a camcorder narrating as I go. Amateurish, maybe. Authentic, absolutely. This is the same experience you would get if I were personally showing you property…same comments, same observations, same dumb jokes, same sarcastic remarks!
The point being, you’re getting both pictures and words, albeit audio and not text. I can show you and tell you at the same time. Bye bye virtual tour - actually I never did them anyway.
If you are a buyer and would like to send me on assignment, I’m happy to do it. I want more practice and I want the opportunity to show and tell you about the house in context.
If you are a seller and this approach to marketing catches your fancy, let’s talk. Every house has a story. Let me help you tell yours.
Congrats, Kevin, on the BHB linlback!
Looking forward the Oscars next year so I can see you receive the Best Director award for Apharetta Real Estate Video Tours!
I’m a big video fan and think it’s the way of the future for real estate marketing. I’m a also a tech fan and am curious about the equipment used to produce your videos. Camera? Editing Software?
I’m using a simple $500 Panasonic digital HDD camcorder and Adobe Premier to edit the video.
I did, also, stumble upon a nifty little FREE video format translator called SUPER from eRightSoft that I’ve been using to convert from mpeg formats to flash for uploading to youtube.
Kevin,
You did an EXCELLENT job with that video. I have been experimenting with video for my own business, and it’s murder to get everything just right. You couldn’t possibly have scripted all that, which means that “you were just being you.” Again, awesome job.
Harry