Over the years, one thing we Real Estate agents have become renown for is our property videos.
We started making videos way back before Tik Tok, Instagram and even Facebook (for those of you who might be reading this and are under the age of 21…yes there was a time not so long ago where people survived without social media…hard to believe I know).
Back then, a video was very expensive to produce and there were limited opportunities for how it could be used.
We’d often hand out copies of the video on DVD at open homes and have it play on the owner’s TV during the open home…and YouTube was only just starting to gain traction.
The technology of Facebook back then wasn’t particularly conducive to videos of large sizes either, so often we’d load the video to YouTube and hope that many would share the link via email to gain traction. When we started, we didn’t even have our own channel on YouTube so it was all rather primitive when comparing it to viral content today.
At the time we started, we couldn’t even host the video on the major real estate portals, and we spent plenty of time hassling them to allow for video content to be included in property marketing.
I spent lots of time writing scripts and trying to make the video worth watching and sharing…with the idea being that people would share it around and the property would gain more exposure and, as a result, a higher price.
It was working really well and, apart from a handful of other agents in Australia using creative videos, the only other video agents were using was a slideshow where photos were stitched together with a light music track over the top – a very boring and completely useless idea.
So, our videos were working and gaining a lot of attention.
It wasn’t uncommon for our videos to be obtaining several thousand views (not exactly what I’d call an ‘influencer’ by today’s standards), but I didn’t really care about number of views – I was purely targeting property owners in our area and this was proving to be successful.
We kept good statistics and we concluded (with absolute clarity) that properties with videos were selling in half the time and for an average of 3-5% more than those without videos.
Our very early videos were pretty ordinary, and I think I’ve purposefully deleted many of them, but I wish I’d kept the really early ones just for a good laugh.
Remember, if you need any help or advice we are just a phone call away.
All the best, Simon.