When real estate agencies think video marketing, they often just think of putting home tour videos on YouTube or possibly giving viewers a market update on YouTube. Aside from having a short shelf-life, these videos aren’t really compelling to watch and therefore many real estate agencies are left spinning their tires by making these kinds of videos.

Let’s take a look at some other types of videos, video tools and video tactics suggested by people in the industry that work well for building your leads list.

“Why not turn that into productive time?”

Owen Hemsath
Video Marketing Consultant at VideoSpot

Owen suggests using Facebook Live or some other live video streaming service while showing a home for dual purposes:

• Showing the home
• Creating useful content

If you’re “stuck” in a home all day waiting for people to stop by, you can use any down time to do a Facebook Live showing of the home, taking people on a virtual tour of it. You can save this video for later to send to prospective buyers.

Also during your down time at the home, Owen suggests recording content for future videos using the strengths of that particular home. For example, if you are in a home with great antique doorknobs or great flooring, you can record some content for a future video on the best types of door knobs for your character home or the best type of flooring.

The recording shouldn’t take too long and if you have edited videos before, the editing likely won’t take you long either. You’ll be left with a nice tips video that you can use to attract clients.

“The drone has been a valuable piece of my kit for shooting real estate videos.”

Grant Johnston
Photographer and Videographer

Not everyone will be comfortable flying and recording with a drone, but if you are tech savvy and you sell big houses on big properties, these machines can come in handy (providing you put in the time and effort to use them effectively).

Grant suggests a variety of shots, but most of them involve flying along the property toward the house and revealing it in the shot while also giving an indication of the size of the property and where the home sits in relation to the property.

Even if the property isn’t big, a good aerial shot of a home can do wonders for showing it off. Grant is a professional videographer and obviously it would be nearly impossible to get the same quality of shots as him, but with some practice, you can add a drone to your real estate video kit.

“The light bulb went on that this is a great great tool for real estate agents, not necessarily for giving virtual tours, but for allowing them to market their property to their buyer’s agents.”

Garrett Davis
Photographer/Videographer

Garrett is talking here about Facebook Live (it’s kind of a big deal in Real Estate in case you hadn’t noticed). His point is that Facebook Live allows a realtor to get a head start on the marketing of a property.

Even before you get the property on the listings or you hire your photographer or videographer, you can give people a sneak peak into the house and alert your buyer’s agents that it’s on the market.

While he was getting ready to shoot a video of a new listing for a client, Garrett says, he decided to shoot a Facebook Live video just to test it out since he had never used it before. Within a few minutes, another agent he knew was sending him questions about the house and checking her list of potential buyers to see if anyone would be interested in it. He had essentially gotten a head start on the marketing of this particular house with a simple Facebook Live video. You can tag people in the video to make sure they see it, so if you have any buyer’s agents in your Facebook friends list, this is a real time marketing trick that you can use even before you start the actual marketing of the property.

“It’s called Snapchat Story for a reason.”

Matt Leighton
Real Estate Agent

Switching gears a bit, another way you can use video for real estate marketing is with the Snapchat app, which is essentially like instant messaging except that it uses photos and short videos that disappear after 10 seconds instead of text.

It’s usefulness as a marketing tool stems from the fact that it’s a huge social network and engagement from followers is high.

Unfortunately, because there is no reliable way to search for followers on Snapchat, you have to find potential followers on other social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. That also means that if you don’t have a solid foundation set up on your website and your blog, plus a strong following on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, then Snapchat will largely be useless to you.

However, if you do have all set up and you already have strong followings, then Snapchat can be a nice addition to it.

Realtor Matt Leighton suggests using Snapchat to tell a story about the house you’re featuring. Resist the urge to just send a single photo or video of the home with no context about it.

Rather, send a series of photos or videos (he suggests not mixing the two) about the home to tell a story. For example, if the home inspector is at a house, you can create a story around the house being inspected. Anything that needs replacement, you can add a price tag to it to let your followers know how much it would cost to get replaced.

Leighton also recommends taking advantage of Snapchat’s geofilter feature.

It’s clear video is an amazing tool for real estate agents and that extends to explainer videos, too. Click here to use our price estimation calculator to see approximately how much your video will cost. (You don’t even need to talk to anyone!)