As we continue to talk about the hard numbers around real estate video, the "steak" rather than the "sizzle", we are noticing a goodly number of real estate video sites starting to post more data about their views.

Informational Video Vs. Property Video Data

However, though numbers are a good thing, they can be misconstrued like any data.  Let's assume for a moment that prospective buyers spend time at sites where they can look at properties. If a video site has the majority of their video views skewed towards content that have little to do with selling properties, it's safe to assume that few *buyers* are actually visiting and re-visiting their site.  Not good when it's your time and/or money involved in producing property videos to help sell a property.

Youtube is one great example of the skew between property videos and informational videos.  There are real estate related videos on YouTube that have thousands of views...but what do the best property videos have in the first weeks?  Generally a few dozen...the average was about 10 for the last study that we did.  So, clearly, the thousands of people watching roller coaster videos, conference videos, neighborhood overviews, and the like have little correlation to the people watching property videos. Almost all video sites' views are heavily skewed towards informational videos - we seem to be an exception - our sites have a greater than 3:1 ratio of visitors watching property videos over informational videos.

It isn't about making a video..it's about selling a property.

Tips On How To Avoid The Obvious Shell Games

I'm a vendor but I can still share some of the things that I look for when looking at other video sites: 

- Do Your Own Poking Around: Ignore the sizzle around real estate video. If there is an attitude of "take our word for the effectiveness" on the site vs being able to search or browse to make a self determination about effectiveness, look for other options.

- Look To See What Data Is Being Collected:  A vendor should be open about video views and you should be realistic about expectations. In my opinion, a lack of video view data across any or all of the videos is a warning sign. Remember that a one month old vendor will simply not have the same traffic as a real estate video vendor that has a few years in the business.  However, a company with a few years should also have significant data to share.  If a vendor has been around for a while and only recently began to publically count, well, that should tell you more than I can tell you but you can draw your own conclusions.

- Discount Data That Isn't Applicable To Selling Property: If you have filmed a property video or spending money to have one made, look at the data only for property videos. Be sure to look across all of the properties rather than just the ones with the most hits.  If most are low and a few are high, you are more likely to fall into the low group rather than the high group...especially if you don't have friends with highly trafficked websites. Many of the most highly touted sites only have significant traffic for informational videos from a few sites. 

- Pay Most Attention To The Data For The First Two Weeks: Our data shows that the same rules that apply online listings also apply to real estate videos - the first two weeks are most important and the first month is next. If when looking across the video data, you notice that video views for properties posted for two weeks are low on average for the first two weeks...but a lot higher for the older videos, there may be  problem.

What Will Vidlisting.com Do Differently?

http://vidlisting.com/ will begin taking a different track starting with our next set of posted property videos. We have more than 60,000 videos watched monthly. Any site with honest-to-gosh prospective buyers on their site looking at and, in some cases, buying properties should be willing to demonstrate their key metrics.  We'll begin voluntarily making two week and one month video view numbers for property videos available on our player page as part of the user experience.  This numbers will be in addition to the total video view numbers which have historically been available for all of our property and informational videos.

Tony