Real estate agents have been slow to understand the appeal of video to home buyers and sellers.
One of our clients, Coldwell Banker’s Apostal Group, has taken the time to offer buyers the unusual experience of two different video takes on the same unit, a 4-bedroom, 3-bath loft at 850 W Adams in the West Loop.
In the video above Niko Apostal tours Chicago Magazine’s Dennis Rodkin through Unit 5AB, which is priced at $1,150,000. In the video below, Niko showed YoChicago’s Joe Askins around the same unit last November.
I’ve struggled to see the appeal of video for real estate. The clips in your post are about as good as any I’ve seen; they have good production values, aren’t shaky and you can hear the audio. They are watchable, but they still don’t do much for me.
Seeing two people talking about a kitchen and saying “this is a large kitchen” is less engaging to me than high-quality large-format photography coupled with a floorplan.
If you’re looking for anything beyond novelty value or some potential seo impact with video, I think you probably need to hire professional actors and videographers. A house with a great story – one that was part of the underground railroad, then used by Al Capone as a speakeasy, and now operating as a church – might lend itself to anyone with a smartphone making great videos, but most real estate won’t.
Or am I missing something – are you seeing a lot of traffic on your videos of individual properties?
Nick,
We do see a lot of traffic, and the SEO value is important. You can see the audience numbers for individual videos at YouTube, and you can see the search results by searching relevant keywords.
You seem to be judging the utility of real estate video by its general entertainment value rather than its value to home buyers and sellers. Professional actors and high production values are beside the point, and would make video unaffordable for all but a very few homes.
Think of real estate video as a much more useful, informative brochure targeted to interested buyers rather than as a show trying to gain a generic audience.
Also consider the productivity and convenience benefits to agents, buyers and sellers from reducing showings to marginal buyers and increasing showings to those who have a clearer picture of the home.
That’s for starters.
Have you done any analysis of how quickly homes marketed with a video sell compared to homes without one? That would be the most compelling argument to me and to most sellers.
NIck,
We haven’t done that research and, to my knowledge, no one else has. There are simply too many variables to make the results meaningful in any event.
VHT has survey research to the effect that homes with video have higher perceived value to buyers.
Just curious – how much would this place be worth in New York ? Maybe I’m watching too much Selling New York, but I have a friend from NY who is searching for something in this location or South Loop and (800k-1m) salary range.
Solo,
Would depend on locaiton in NY – could easily be 4-8x the Chicago price.
I think Nick has too much time on his hands. I advise if Nick is or becomes a real estate agent he not make videos to attempt to help sell properties as his own personal choice.