If you are someone who is in the business of selling or renting property, and that business requires you to give prospective customers tours of that property (whether infrequently or multiple times per day), then you need to at least be considering video tours—if not relying fully upon them. A video tour, sometimes called a talking brochure, is a perfect way to conserve your own precious resources while reaching a broad target audience. Here is how it works.
Make a video of yourself (or whoever gives the tours for your business) giving a perfect tour through a listed property. The video can simply be shot from the perspective of the tour-taker, following the presenter through the home. This tour differs from a more conventional tour in that you will obviously have no interaction with your customer. Think back on your previous tours—there have undoubtedly always been questions that interrupt your tour, and you are expected to provide that information to your customers. In a video tour, your customer will still have all the same questions, but no way to stop the tour to ask you. Therefore, this particular presentation needs to be very thorough; you need to sit down and come up with all of the relevant questions that a prospective buyer or renter would want to ask, and you need to be sure to answer them clearly and concisely in your tour. I say concisely because—as in all matters which require acquiring and maintaining peoples’ attention—you can’t put out a 45 minute video and expect people to remain focused. Keep it under five minutes, but pack it full of all the useful information you would want to know before moving forward with a major transaction.
Once you’ve made your five minute video, you’ll need to distribute it for viewing. The easiest, cheapest, and most practical way to do this is using the internet. Your business should already have a website, but if you don’t, that is the first step (we won’t deal with that here). When you add the video to your website, don’t bury it behind links tabs and URLs and whatnot. Present it up front, make your tours clearly visible and easy to click and play. This is your product—advertise it! Finally, be sure you make it very easy for your customer to contact you. We all know the frustration of using the internet to search for an email address or phone number, only to click link after link finding no way to reach a human being. Make your business email and phone readily available both on and around the video tour in your website.
Going through this one-day process will save you countless hours of meeting customers for tours, driving time and gas money, and where you could only do so many tours in one day before, with a video on the internet you can reach an unlimited number of people in any period of time. It’s a marketer’s dream, and it’s a tool that must not be overlooked by real estate professionals.
What do you think? Let us know below.