Using Video To Sell A House - and, A Video from Libya

Is this the way to sell a house online?

This month we're making an aggressive drive to create some partnerships with real estate companies for online video.

As I noted yesterday, even the best real estate agencies have limited video, and the video that they do have is more like a series of stills set to music.  It captures perhaps 2% of the potential that video as a medium carries.

I had a conversation last month with CORE, a real estate agency in NY who are also the subject of an HGTV series, Selling New York.  Being so aggressive in the television promotion area, I had thought that CORE's CEO would 'get' the idea of using video to promote the sale of homes.  CORE 'got it', but said, 'why would I want to urge people to promote their homes. That's what I do'.  Well, sort of.  As we mentioned yesterday, classifieds with text only were soon driven out by websites with photos. Today it is unlikely anyone would even have the slightest interest in a house with no photos.  Video, I explained to the CORE guy, is inevitable.

"I know", he said. "I completely agree, but I don't want to do it".

Well, there you are.

Shaun Trevethan, a regular reader of this blog, wrote to me this morning:

Michael,

I saw your recent post about the Real Estate Video Challenge.  Last year I shot a few Real Estate Videos and some of the issues I came into was trying to convince the Realtor that the Virtual Tours they used was not the same as video.  Many of them, especially the older ones think just because the photo's "pan" they think it was the same as video.

I agree.

So now we have to show the real estate companies what compelling video for home selling is all about.

Which raises the question - what does that look like?

I don't know.. yet

I have received a few videos for our Home Sales Video Challenge already, but they tend to be the stills to music thing.

It's OK, but I think we can better.

One of our favorite shows on TV is House Hunters on HGTV.

Distilled down to its basics, you just look at 3 houses.

But it has all the elements of great film-making - characters, arc of story and resolution.

I don't think we're going to be able to do this for home sales in a 1-2 minute version, but I think a 'character or two' are helpful.

They are the surrogates of the viewer and look at the things the viewer would want to see, and ask the questions and react the way the prospective buyer would react.  They also make the experience of looking at the house more 'real'.  I am not sure, but I tend to think that 'casting' the house video will help. 

VJ NEWS FROM LIBYA

One of our best friends is Associated Press VJ Raul Gallego Abellan.

The AP doesn't have many VJs, and Raul is pretty much self-invented, but this has not prevented him from winning a lot of major awards, including one from the very prestigious Royal Television Society in London last year.

He does war zones. He's covered Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt. Now he's in Libya, and sent me his latest work.

Check it out