Joel Burslem, who writes the Future of Real Estate Marketing blog, is an expert in the way real estate agents are using video advertising. Real estate is a great example of an industry that is increasing its use of video, with realtors offering video home tours on their own blogs and sites, and real estate listing sites like Wellcomemat.com. Burslem discusses the growth of video advertising in the real estate market and where the ads are playing.
iSPOT: Discuss your background with the blog and Inman News.
Burslem: I have my blog Futureofrealestatemarketing.com. I write about technology and the way realtors can use the Internet in their marketing. I started the blog a year and a half ago and recently was offered a job by Inman News to come help steer some of their social media efforts. It’s based in Emeryville, Calif.
iSPOT: Some examples of video advertising in the real estate market are TurnHere, which produces videos for real estate companies, Featureposting.com, a real estate site, and the Real Estate Channel, on online TV network. What do you think about those opportunities and others you know about?
Burslem: I think there is a real transition. When consumers go to net, they’re looking for listings for homes for sale. Real estate 1.0 is the move to put all listings online, so you saw sites like Realtor.com succeed. What I’m calling Real estate 2.0 is context listings. Most listings are online but they lack context, that’s where video can have a powerful place in providing context to home listings. A lot of real estate agents are waking up to it and see the power of video online. They’re playing video tours. I would draw a distinction. There’s two ways video is being used, both are technically video but a lot of what you see is just an animated slide show, technically it’s video with the Flash player and it may be in a Quicktime format but I think video is much richer, it’s about telling a story, so the best example I’ve seen online is a company called Wellcomemat.com. They hook up videographers with real estate agents and do home tours. I’m a big believer in that when you see a video tour that’s been properly produced, it doesn’t have to be expensive, just someone following a realtor in a home walk through, it’s such a personal experience.
iSPOT: Do the videos play at realtors’ sites or on the Wellcomemat site?
Burlsem: Wellcomemat is like YouTube, it provides a player and a number of sizes, which the realtor can embed on their blog or site. In many cases they’s staring to do deals with large brokerages to allow video links to be on the listings at sites like Realtor.com or Remax.com. The goal is to enable video to be taken wherever they need to be, wherever consumers are, that’s what realtors want, to be in front of consumers.
iSPOT: Can all types of properties be sold this way, including commercial properties?
Burslem: Yes, I would say any time you’re talking about a piece of property, commercial is a good part of it, as well as rental homes.
iSPOT: Are video ads running nationally, or are they concentrated in any geographic region?
Burslem: I would say it’s fairly national. There are obviously pockets on the coasts that are more technically advanced, like New York and San Francisco where you see wider adoption rates. I am seeing realtors starting to use it more. Video has been in real estate for eons, but up until recently it was mainly used in luxury high end homes because of the cost structure. With $2,000 to $5,000 in production costs, an agent based on commission has to make a larger investment, so the property has to be worth a certain amount of money. Only the multi million dollar homes could afford to spend up to $5,000 on production.
iSPOT: Is it changing because the price of making videos is coming down?
Burslem: Yes, we’re starting to see delivery over the net rather than have to press DVDs. Internet delivery has cut down the cost. There are free hosts like YouTube and Google Video and with portable digital cameras realtors can shoot web videos so there doesn’t need to be a big production cost. So they’re waking up to the power of it. Anyone who’s watched the videos will attest to it as a more powerful selling experience because you get more story on the property than you do with static photos or text.
iSPOT: How do think video works with other media?
Burslem: Any time you do marketing around a property, it needs to be complementary, but I haven’t seen too many realtors using video ads with banner units. The embeddable nature of web video allows agents the flexibility to take it wherever it needs to go whether that’s on their own blogs or sites or even being able to e-mail or an electronic postcard with links to the videos because the video is independent of the actual destination.
iSPOT: How do consumers find the videos ads if they’re all over the place?
Burslem: If we’re talking about videos of listings, consumers will find them the way they’ve traditionally found them through Realtor.com or other real estate search engines. The way I like to think about it is this concept of search funnels. On top of the funnel you have a very broad search. Let’s say you’re searching real estate in one state, then narrow it down to a city and from there you get into neighborhoods. At each stage you go down the funnel and narrow your search criteria, At some point you’ll see individual listings and that’s where web video gets inserted into the equation. What we’re seeing is it’s an important differentiator. When you have it down to a few listings that all meet your criteria, you come down that funnel and you hit the ones with video. They’ll be looked at first. It sets them apart and it’s also a way especially for areas that rely on a lot of buyers from out of state or overseas. Videos are a very powerful way to finalize a deal. There was an apartment in New York shown to an Italian lady and she had to clear the deal with her parents in Italy, so she sent them a link to the video and her father emailed back and said ‘Buy it.’ It was consummated on the spot. So it’s not just in the search funnel, but helping to seal the deal at the end of the day if they can’t visit the property in person.
iSPOT: Who’s selling the video advertising the realtors are playing?
Burslem: There’s money to be made on the production side. Wellcomemat and individual video sites are pitching videos to realtors. On the more local level videos are being sold by companies like MLPodCast. It’s still very much local small pros pitching the idea to realtors. I haven’t seen any on the national level outside of Turnhere, although their video productions are different. They don’t go into individual listings, they do company profiles, when a brokerage tells the story of the company. It’s not as scalable and they’re a little more expensive than the average realtor would be able to spend, The key to making money is realtors don’t have a lot to spend. There’s a perception that realtors make a ton of money, but the reality is they don’t so they’re cautious in spending, so video advertising has to go down to sub $200 for realtors to consider it in most cases. It’s a tough business to scale but production costs have come way down.
