Video tours are a great way to differentiate yourself from other agents in the area and give home searchers a better look at what the property truly feels like before taking the plunge to see the property.
Furthermore, video tours are easier and easier to create with modern technology: as an agent, if you do the photos for your customers yourself, your digital camera most likely has a video option, so there is no need to invest in new technology. For those who hire professionals, they would most likely do video tours for you as well.
Video Tours Save you Time
By offering video tours, buyers can truly get a scope and feel of the property without taking the next step of making an appointment, which saves you time with customers who may feel the property is not what they are looking for. Likewise, buyers who may have thought to exclude certain properties may change their minds when they take a look at the video and make an appointment. As such, video tours can save you time and bring you more clients at the same time!
They're an Incentive to Clients
With videos becoming more and more popular of a media format on the internet, telling a potential client that you will do a video tour of their home and list it online is a great incentive to have them list with you. Given as in the USA the competition is getting fiercer with your unfortunate housing problem, you've got to do what you can as an agent to stand out, and video tours are one of the best ways I can recommend to do that when it comes to your online image.
They're Great for Exposure
Since Google has bought YouTube, you may have noticed that for some Google searches, videos from YouTube show up among the results. By uploading your videos to sites like YouTube you will have access to the homeowners searching for a place in your region on YouTube, but also those on Google.
The Main (only?) Downside
Unfortunately, the current MLS.com and MLS.ca sites don't really offer video tours. This is really the only downside that I can see right now. However, this doesn't prevent you from linking to your video tours directly from your agent website.
How To Set it Up
Once you have your video, setting it up online can be relatively easy. There are two main ways of doing this: link to an external video, or upload it to your site. The former is the easiest way to do this and will give you the most marketing exposure for your time. This works like the video tour links in Canadiana Property: upload your video to a site such as YouTube and then link to it from your website (see an example by clicking here, the video tour link is the top link on the right hand colum). This way, not only does your video appear on your website, but it also has all of the exposure that YouTube gets it. (I do apologize as I didn't mean for this to be a shameless plug, but it is a good example of how to set things up.)
Your other option is to upload your video directly to your website. This is much more complicated and keeps your video from being available on YouTube unless you specifically upload it yourself separately. For this reason, I would recommend going with the first option, of uploading to YouTube and linking from your site.
And that's it! If you have any questions, I absolutely will do my best to answer them for you. I hope you found this little guide useful!
Thanks,
Hannah
Hannah McIntyre is the founder of CanadianaProperty.ca, a modernized and feature-rich real estate listing website designed to give prospective home owners a comprehensive and easy to use home searching tool.
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