I'm back in Panama waiting for lunch from a local chinese restaurant to be delivered and thinking about how to frame this post. The choice of lunch is interesting as the restaurant, Don Lee, is a local Panamanian chain of fast food restaurants that happen to sell chinese food.  Think of dishes from Don Lee being as related to real chinese food as Taco Bell in the US is related to authentic Mexican cuisine.

Don Lee and Taco Bell are representative of a dining niche that prioritizes "close enough", "speedy", and "familiar" over "authenticity", "experience", and "special". 

Is there a relationship between these related but distinct approaches to consumption with real estate video?

There are many great real estate video companies doing business right now and clearly more will be entering the market over time. Lots of people have started asking why real estate video isnt used more in selling high end properties. Assuming that good real estate video companies *are* open for business, which of the above two approaches would be more prized by a seller and objectively which of the two have most sellers been more exposed to on the web?

All real estate videos are not created equally.  As time passes, the standards and expectations for production level quality of real estate video will rise much like what happened to music videos and, frankly, website development. In the 80s, known bands could have a crappy music video and in the 90s, big companies could have really basic websites. Not so much anymore...

My thinking is that we as an blossoming industry is analagous to either being the bug or the windshield.  Industry wide real estate video production standards can either drive customer expectations or customer expectations can drive standards. Right now, there are few standards, expectations are low, and as such, people wont care if there is a destination or a single video. Anecdotal evidence mixed with some data from our own real estate video site generally shows us that higher quality video means faster market adoption within the influence area of the video. Volume of video may drive video views but quality drives adoption by sellers.

The more content generators that adopt a hig leve of production standards, the more expectations will rise among viewers and more importantly the more adoption we'll see by sellers

If we view real estate video as a true developing "industry", then by driving production standards upwards in an organized and generally accepted fashion within the "industry", my guess is that customer expectations would shortly follow suit...and single videos on a REALTOR site can have the same appeal as a site packed with real estate videos. At the same time, they'll be more likely to drive adoption by other local sellers until video just becomes the norm.

Without a set of industry quality production standards, we'll be stuck with "close enough", "speedy", and, unfortunately, "familiar".

Tony (daily blog: http://forsalebylocals.wordpress.com )

real estate video sites: http://vidlisting.com (English) / http://bienesraicesvideo.com (Spanish) / http://imoveisvideo.com (portuguese)