I think that YouTube has particular potential for the real estate market. It just makes sense that a video tour of a property would be more appealing than a few static pictures. Wouldn’t you prefer a video walkthrough of a house you might be interested in purchasing?
Some realtors recognize the potential and are getting ahead of the curve. One of these forward-thinking real estate agents is Annette Lawrence, who is using YouTube to promote those communities that she services and attract potential purchasers.
Company Profile
Company: Annette Lawrence, Realtor
Product: Real estate
YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/user/SunShineHomes
Website: www.annettelawrence.com
For more than 17 years, Annette Lawrence has been selling real estate in the Tampa Bay area. She started out selling commercial real estate and moved to residential sales in 2001. Her focus is on the price point segment that represents 60% of the local market: single-family homes priced at or below $400,000. Her typical buyer is a 30+ couple who is relocating to the area, or second-home buyers who have selected Tampa Bay as their destination.
Annette is ardent about what she does. Her real estate philosophy is that home buyers must fall in love with a community before they have the passion to buy; her marketing philosophy is that an overwhelming presence will displace the competition.
Like most realtors, Annette has embraced the Internet as a channel for displaying real estate listings. She maintains several websites, each with a specific purpose: Some are lead capture landing pages, some are informational, and some are for the sole purpose of promoting personal branding and listings. Many of the websites aim to assuage client expectations or to facilitate transaction coordination among the buyer, seller, agent, title company, and lenders. She is always looking for new ways to promote her properties—which ultimately led her to YouTube.
Annette got the idea of using YouTube by spending some time with web search engines. She found that the frequency of searches containing the word video with a location name greatly exceeded the number containing the words homes or real estate with the same location. And when you’re talking web video, YouTube is the first site that comes to mind.
When doing her research, Annette saw YouTube as a way to promote her properties in a cost- and time-efficient manner. As she puts it, “YouTube offered a desired viral component with streaming and imbed capability that allowed a reasonably easy means to minimize my direct time.”
Her first videos were a series of “Refreshing Hikes” that highlighted area attractions, touted benefits of the locale, and promoted the Florida lifestyle. This fit into her overall approach to selling:
My philosophy is to promote my brand via unrelated sources. When my primary message is delivered, the consumer is already aware of my prevalence in my market, my community engagement, and my expansive resources and knowledge of the area. These videos create a familiarity and trust in the consumer prior to actually meeting me.
Thus the majority of Annette’s YouTube videos serve much as tour guides to a particular community. Other videos, of course, highlight specific properties, functioning as more direct sales vehicles.
Based on this strategy, some of Annette’s videos have attracted more than 20,000 viewers; others might get only 200 views. It all depends on how broad the appeal of the video. As Annette says, “The more localized the video, the lower the viewing count.” With that said, the localized videos are often the most significant in attracting solid buyers, which makes them a valuable part of her YouTube mix. Based on the number of viewers, she can project the likelihood of when she will receive a purchase offer.
As of May 2008, Annette has more than 50 videos in her YouTube library. Most are public videos, but she also maintains a library of private videos reserved for potential buyers via invitation. Many of her videos are seasonal, rotating in and out of availability at the appropriate time of year.
These videos have had a dramatic affect on Annette’s sales. She credits this to the unique nature of her videos and the quality of the narratives, which distinguish her presentations from those of other realtors. She also believes that the companion high-resolution videos provide a “knock your socks off” immersion every home seller wants to have for their home.
It doesn’t take a lot of money to produce one of Annette’s real estate videos; a typical five-minute video will cost between $500 and $800 to produce. Even at that, Annette makes sure each video has multiple uses (suitable for multiple applications and websites) before making the investment.
Most of Annette’s videos are slideshow-like virtual home tours. They contain dozens of images set to appealing background music, often with audio commentary by Annette or another narrator. Naturally, each video begins and ends with Annette’s contact information. They typically run four or five minutes in length.
Before she starts work on a new video, Annette does a lot of research on the property for sale and on potential buyers. Here’s how she approaches a new project:
First, I need a clue! What would a person be willing to exchange an irreplaceable piece of their life for? I feel an obligation to convey information of use to the viewer, in addition to my messages. When I do a home tour I also include area information and images any visitor, resident, home buyer or home seller would find beneficial.
When it comes time to produce the video, the biggest chore is getting quality source images; this is also the most expensive part of the process. She starts with about 100 images and throws out all those blurry pictures, foot shots, and other unusable pictures. Then it’s time for image optimization (editing), cropping, and, if needed, stitching together of multiple images for larger panoramas. She reduces the size of each image to something appropriate for YouTube viewing, and then starts putting the presentation together—sequencing the shots and adding transitions and pans for a “Ken Burns” effect. Next, she applies text overlays to the presentation, creates and records an accompanying narrative, and then synchronizes background clips with image subject segments. With all that done, it’s time to render (publish) the video, convert it to a YouTube-friendly format, and post it to YouTube.
Annette has several unique ways in which she promotes her YouTube videos. One I find particularly intriguing involves the seller of a property in the promotion. She encourages the homeowners to send their home’s YouTube video link to 5,000 of their closest friends—and have all of them give the video a five-star rating. This helps the video appear higher on viewer search results pages, thus gaining increased exposure for the video.
Another approach is to embed a video of a refreshing hike or recent event into existing websites. As Annette says, “Folks love these videos and will click through to my YouTube videos.” She embeds personal message videos into vertical channel sites, providing very specialized information. These sites also host avatars with welcoming messages; the avatar’s text-to-speech capability enables her to communicate to hundreds of communities with a single message edit.
To help promote these vertical websites, Annette uses a variety of traditional and new media tools. She says that one of the most effective promotional tools is the old-fashioned road sign. The sign most often contains nothing more than the site’s URL, such as www.mydunedin.com (for properties in Dunedin, Florida). In this instance, Annette says that every citizen of Dunedin will check out the site, just to see what it’s about!
Annette likes the viral nature of the YouTube service, how a video can just take off when discovered by viewers. She’s also a big fan of YouTube’s new statistics-reporting: “The Insight function provides me the tools I need to generalize where to project my brand in remote locales.”
As Annette points out, using YouTube is like any web-based endeavor. You need to understand, in your enterprise, how to fan the consumer into your net. Here’s how she puts it:
Now, how will the fellow shivering in his socks in Nebraska (or whoever your subject is) type words that will find your message? As a businessperson, you must know how this takes place. If you believe you can hire someone who knows your business better than you—well, money talks and yours will be saying ‘byebye.’
Obviously knowing your business is imperative. Knowing how you want to do business is equally important. Some would say my business is real estate. They may also say McDonald’s business is hamburgers. Both, of course, are incorrect. My business model is derived from the book,Rich Dad, Poor Dad. The poor dad was very good at finding work. The rich dad was very good at finding networks. How is your business connected to meaningful global networks, national networks, regional networks, local networks, and grass roots networks? How are you energizing those networks to work for you? Can you get the same results if you just put out a few road signs? A clear picture of a fuzzy concept won’t work.
Annette sums up her YouTube experience with this timeless advice:
Finally, have patience. Believe in your strategy. And don’t do anything you can’t measure!
Sounds like a plan to me.
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