Looking for property on the Gold Coast? Spending all your spare time inspecting houses that aren’t suited to your needs? Then let video do the hard work for you – you can ‘tour’ hundreds of prospective properties without leaving the comfort of your own home.
These days nearly every major real estate website is starting to incorporate video virtual tours (in the U.S. visit Wellcomemat.com, but in Australia keep a look out for a “video tour” link on sites like realestate.com.au, or check out newcomer www.propertycinema.com.au for a site completely dedicated to property video tours).
Last week Soul Arch Media launched a new budget Gold Coast video real estate tour for a contemporary two bedroom beachside unit at Kirra on the southern end of the Gold Coast for DJ Stringer property services. Apart from on the custom-built webpage linked to the real estate’s own website and the property sites mentioned earlier, you can also now view the video on YouTube, Metacafe, Google, Revver, DailyMotion, Blip.tv and several other internet video sharing sites.
For estate agents and property owners, the more websites the property features on the merrier- as video can be tagged and easily indexed for SEO, it regularly shows up high on search engines like google. So by releasing it online via video sharing sites, it increases the chances of the video being found by people typing in related keywords (i.e.: “Coolangatta property” or “Kirra Unit” etc etc), reaching people who are actively seeking what the video has to offer. Doesn’t that sound better than the hit ‘n miss nature of very expensive TV or newspaper ads?
There are also other bonus ways video can help promote real estate:
1. Users can create a free podcast channel on iTunes, so any new video tours are automatically sent out to subscribers. That means that people looking for property in the area can be notified instantly whenever a new property video tour appears, and also allows you to send video to people’s ipods or iphones.
2. Video tours can easily be “looped” to show on TV screens inside real estate offices or even in the store’s front window for a more dynamic way to capture interest from passers-by.
3. Video tours can also serve as a kind of “video business card” for the real estate agents presenting them – if done well a video tour can raise an agent’s profile and impress potential clients.
Vist our Gold Coast video production facility at SoulArchMedia.com if you’d like to find out more about how video can help property sales while making real estate shopping easy!
I was reading an online post today about how a company called Maps Alive are taking the interactive map thing a step further than google maps (which is also an amazing product, don’t get me wrong!) by allowing users to attach video to any map, floor plan, or diagram, with a video player popping up when users hover their cursor over certain designated points. How cool is that? The company predicts the greatest demand will be coming from the real estate and travel industry sectors, and it’s not hard to guess why.
Can you imagine how useful mapping out exactly where all your available properties for sale are (or for travel agents, where all the Gold Coast holiday resorts you sell package tours for are) then adding the interactive capability for you clients to view videos of each property at the click of a button? It’s an amazingly clear and concise way of presenting the same information that would normally take up a lot of your potential customers precious time time viewing pages upon pages on your website to discover – that’s if they didn’t give up in frustration from searching long beforehand!
Although websites in the U.S.A. like Wellcomemat.com have already pushed the popularisation of web video in the real estate sector overseas, adding functionality for using online video tours on company websites (for example by using tools to embed video into maps) may just be the spark that really helps online video take off in other parts of the world. Here on the Gold Coast, like most parts of Australia, online video production in the real estate and holiday booking industries is only just starting to gain wider popularity – it’s still uncommon enough that any Gold Coast travel agents or property sales teams who incorporate video into their marketing mix stand out from the everyday Joes. But with more applications like this on the market? Web video will become compulsory if a company in those sectors doesn’t want to be left behind in the dust. And aside from its obvious applications for real estate and travel professionals? Just about any company from any industry could use it to “put themselves on the map,” literally. Exciting stuff!
