Ho Hum...you are parked dead in the water at an open house. Whatever floats your boat.

The place is so quiet, the clock on the mantle reminds you of the time you are trapped there. You scheduled  a two or three hour block of time when it worked for you and the owner's time frame to be away shopping at a mall two hours distant. Garaged, stored for the three hour stint and having called everyone and their brother to make sure to stop in for a tour, for some award winning donuts and coffee that tastes like warm water with a brown crayon dipped in it. Ahhhh....open houses. You could make some calls, sketch out the layout for your new real estate website, your next video storyboard or idea for blog posts. You could work on the laptop as if you were at the office catching up on emails. But you are parked at an address for the next two or three hours. Now do a whole 180 degree approach to the open house thinking. Are you with me? Instead of the front door being open and ready for the world to see during a small chunk of time without an appointment, now comes real estate video. Think of the buyer warehoused, waiting with time to kill for three hours at a major airport with wi fi who has the time but in a different time zone than on his Mickey Mouse watch. This guy is working way way too hard. Who wants a place on a lake in Maine or your state, your hometown. Who wants to retire before he strokes out, has a heart attack to a place on a lake that you have just listed.

    

The video you produce that has live narrated audio layed down at the scene, conversational, not rehearsed, not scripted. One on one while he sits slumped in an uncomfortable airport concourse row of seats, watching, listening, learning.

Your video has a story board with the facts, just the facts or highlights spilling out in plenty of time to read and digest them. He meets you Joe Broker, hears your voice, sees you smile genuinely and realizes this guy on the blackberry or lap top wants to help in his real estate quest. This guy on the screen has weaved into the video open house an aerial shot, an easy to read map of the real estate boundaries. He has the video of what the place would look like if this guy was walking through the open front door, around the back yard or over the back forty of the farm. He sees the shoreline of the waterfront cottage. Hears the loons, the singing birds, the water lapping against the dock, crickets, a fishing heading by. The sunset is not a picture still stuck in time, it shows the trees moving, the geese taking off, the water rippling, the sunlight dancing off the lake. He is at your open house that runs 24/7 no matter what his time zone is. He has never been to your hometown, until now.

      The video even has some short clips interspersed with audio tidbits about your area. When he finishes one "show", he checks his watch and has time for a few more. He sees the related real estate and local community videos from you Joe Broker. He bookmarks your site, wants to come back, wants to email the link to one video in particular that made a deep, lasting impression to his wife that is soon watching the same lap top video. As they talk privately on their cell phone about the place and what each thinks about it as it runs, reruns on each video screen they are holding or in front of. They ask each other what the other thinks of the place. No pushy broker standing over them. They are able to shop in the privacy of their own space.

     Real estate dominos snowball like a property avalache. The wife in her housecoat at her home at 10pm on the west coast while you Joe Broker is sawing logs, bagging some zzzzz's, emails the link and comments to her parents. You know to the people who are going in on the real estate buy fifty-fifty who you may never meet but that feel they now know you thanks to the video you uploaded.  You the broker smiles as the views accelerate over the short time the video has been posted. (And you post it in a slew of places to be found and wind your way into buyer's hard drive.) Isn't this the real estate drive thru that you want open and easily found when the buyer is ready for an open house? Or for many open houses on their limited time frame? This guy at the airport and countless folks like him with a little time here and there has been to your open house. He downloads and watches them on his ipod every day for the month on the way to work on the train before his trip to your area. He comes in well versed on the properties because you gave him some open book take home home work. You know folks are watching it and so does your seller by the video view coun. You see the emails caused by this video spark. It's about the customer. Not you the broker. Not the owner of the property.

     The real estate customer now has something  trumping the mantra "location, location, location". It's "timing, timing, timing". The buyer's timing who is suddenly right to purchase somewhere and it might as well be from you. But this timing is limited and not lasting for ever. He is hot to trot. Ready, willing and able to buy. He did not make it to the open house you had eight weeks ago and does not live in your area anyway.... or he doesn't just yet. Don't you want your sold panel screwed to the top of your real estate sign that is parked for the world to see on his new real estate acquistion in the area you serve so proudly? Don't keep the place a secret or reserved for locals able to drop in during the limited three hour time frame  this coming weekend. Produce the real estate video with everything about the place, about you, about your area salt and peppered in every 30 frames per second, every audio bed.

Maine Real Estate Broker/Owner Andrew Mooers - Mooers Realty, The Place For ME Homes, Land, Farms.