Meet Your New Real Estate Agent
November 24, 2008
Post Tags: marketing on the web , Web Marketing Tucson Real Estate , youtube
YouTube Real Estate Agent Not A Good Negotiator
This was the headline on the top of the Business section of the Arizona Daily Star yesterday, (Sunday Nov. 23, 2008); of course it isn’t true, it is a headline designed to grab your attention and pull you into reading the article. When the topic is really about the use of YouTube to market real estate it makes a better headline to say “Meet Your New Real Estate Agent” than to say “Using YouTube to Get Rid of Your Tucson Crib” or “YouTube Your Way to New Digs in Tucson”.
The Title I would have chosen “YouTube for Your 24/7 Open House“.
Not once in the article does it propose you use YouTube as a real estate agent. Using YouTube as a marketing tool to sell real estate is another matter all together. YouTube has become a popular place to post videos of real estate for sale in many local markets.
The quality of the videos posted on YouTube for marketing real estate is usually right up there with “The Blair Witch Project” which in many ways was a precursor to YouTube quality video. I won’t bore you with a detailed analysis of this type of video. Going to YouTube and selecting random videos to watch will suffice.
The question posed and never really answered was this:
Realtors, homeowners turn to Web to help sell properties. Question is: Does it actually work?
The first thing we should note is the question itself. It has been generalized away from YouTube and directed at Marketing on the Web. Can YouTube help sell properties is not the question. Can the Web help sell properties is the question. The answer to both of these questions is YES.
A Virtual Tour After the Purchase
I wrote this post on A Virtual Tour After the Purchase on Nov. 7th. In that post I explained using the Web, in this instance not to market the property, but to use the Web as a medium for sharing with friends and family the purchase of a new home.
This leads me to one of the ways the Web is used to market Tucson real estate. We build virtual tours for every listing we have. We also build virtual tours for buyers who are interested in purchasing property but want relatives and friends to have input into the process. We do this because video is another tool in the marketing bag which makes it easy for potential buyers to narrow their search by viewing properties online.
YouTube video possibilities recently got a lot better. Depending on how the video was created it is now possible to view YouTube videos in hi resolution taking away the mosaic look which was one thing I didn’t like about putting video on YouTube. YouTube has also made available music which can be substituted for the audio track provided with the original video. There is a lot of bad music on real estate video clips.
Tomorrow I’ll address using the web to market Tucson Real Estate and how we do it for our listings (All our listing, not just the high dollar listings).
It is a response to another statement made in yesterday’s article.
“But whether these videos or other Internet goodies actually lead to sales is debatable. Some say sites like Youtube or the free-classified Craigslist are too unfocused to actually spark interest in properties.”
If it is unfocused then enhancing web marketing to sharpen focus would seem to be the answer. It also seems to me the ones calling this tool into question have never used it; maybe I should say used it properly. When Internet marketing is understood it can be used very effectively in marketing real estate; even marketing Tucson Real Estate.
November 24th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
The biggest problem are folks just taking these (usually horrible) zooming slideshows and posting them on YouTube.
People aren’t going to YouTube to watch zooming blurry slideshows of houses! They are going to YouTube to watch video. Video = moving pictures!
Would you be happy walking into your local multiplex and watching a zooming slideshow instead of the feature presentation? Would you be OK with watching your favorite TV show presented as a series of still photos… zooming in and out so stupid people “think” they’re watching a video or movie?
NO.
Yet, this garbage is being put on YouTube everyday. There is a broker in Massachusetts (RE/MAX Innovations) that has put up 10 year old “spin around” virtual tours up on YouTube for every town in the state! They’re all BLURRY – almost unrecognizable – They have no narration, speaking or even music. And you can’t control it with your mouse like you could when these types of tours were the only thing you could do online. They’re horrible. And yet, there are hundreds of those littering YouTube.
If I were a seller and saw most of the garbage that I see on YouTube, I would FIRE my agent on the spot. You can’t represent a $400K +++++++++ home with something that looks like a 5th grader made it with their new video camera. It’s just a disservice to the seller, and it makes the agent look VERY unprofessional. And these Flip video cameras are just making even MORE of the stuff online.
Just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you should.
November 24th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Paul,
Are you sure you don’t have a better formed opinion on these things?
I haven’t shot live video of a house yet. I do take photos which are very high quality and put together a video montage (slideshow) but don’t usually host them on YouTube.
Personally, the poor quality of images on YouTube are a huge turn-off. I don’t like the flip video images or sound. But I hear everyday of people loving them. Maybe many have been desensitized to good video.
Glad I’ve never seen the Massachusetts stuff. Sounds horrible. I was looking at some of the Tucson ones after the article and had to stop, they are so bad it was like torture.
What I do post is approved by the seller or I don’t put it up. Poor quality is something I just can’t bring myself to put up. For my own taste and for the reason you mentioned above. It is a disservice to the seller and the property itself.
Thanks for the comment Paul. Have a great holiday this week.