Virtual Tours

How to Create a Quality Real Estate Video Tour - For Under $100

February 14th, 2008

by AgentCasts Administrator

Real estate video is a hot topic these days for alot of truly viable reasons. If you’re reading this, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve heard many of them already - perhaps a few times. As such, this post is not designed to rehash the benefits of using video for your real estate business. It’s rather intended to show you how these benefits can be efficiently achieved, and to express the level of potential you can now realize with only a minimal tug on your time and marketing budget.

Now we’re not the biggest fans of ‘tooting our own horns’ over here, but our customers sure seem to ‘toot’ them for us pretty darn often these days. Due to a number of recently-received raving client reviews, I’m going to show you an AgentCasts Photo Based Video Tour to let you examine this $97.00 product that they’re buzzing about in action. Here’s a sample, proudly presented in our newly unveiled video player: (RSS readers - click through to view the player)

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Our ‘photo based’ video tours (like the one above) are produced from your listing photos alone into killer video-formatted property presentations that you can use to market your listings literally anywhere online. The professional audio narration you hear is indeed included, and the video player you see can be easily posted (and even custom branded) to your own website. Think this looks and sounds pretty good? Our customers certainly do (and so do we)!

Since these tours are produced and formatted as fully web-compatible videos, we don’t stop at just delivering your property tour in a pretty (and useful) player - that’s really just the beginning. Instead, we take your finished video tour and distribute it to the most relevant web video sites online, and even present and deliver it as a podcast to the top podcasting destinations for you. We even supply an unbranded, ‘MLS Friendly’ version of your tour so that you can link it to your MLS without any hiccups. In short, if the marketing reach and rewards that web video offers are what you’re seeking, our $97.00 solution may very well be worth checking out.

As you can likely tell, we’re really excited about the reviews that are pouring in about our Photo Based Tours, and think that perhaps you should be too. Want more info or a product demo? Get in touch.

Technorati: real estate, real estate video, real estate video tours, real estate marketing, virtual tours, realtor marketing, web video, agentcasts

Enhance Your Real Estate Listings with Google Street View Images!

December 12th, 2007

by AgentCasts Administrator

Google has just released some slick updates to their very-cool ‘Street Views‘ application, which we’re pretty excited about. They’ve added 8 new cities to their growing list of Street View regions - Boston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Detroit, and Providence, and have also added a slick new feature which could benefit real estate sellers in terms of enhancing their listings with neighborhood panorama photos without having to even leave the house to snap a photo: Embeddable Street View Panoramas.

Here’s an example snapshot I’ve embedded of Ocean Drive, down here in Miami Beach Florida:

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So you can now take these visually impressive Google Street View photos and embed them on your own site - right next to your real estate listings if you want! Just go to maps.google.com and pick a location in an area covered by Google Street Views. Once you’ve pulled up the Street View image, simply click ‘Link to this page’ and then ‘Customize and preview embedded map’ so that you’ll be able to select a custom size. Copy the code and paste it onto your own website or blog, and voila - you’re done.

The implications here are pretty self-evident in terms of spicing-up your real estate listings, as now you can show off relevant views in the area where your listing lives without even having to pull your camera out of your pocket. Additionally, we think this is also a pretty cool feature for those of you doing either Virtual Tours or Video Tours for your listings, as now you can easily include some cool area snapshots into your tours if you work or sell in an area which Google Street Views is covering. We’ll certainly be incorporating them here into our AgentCasts property tours right away. Amazing stuff!

Technorati: Google Street View, Images, Maps, Real Estate News, Property Listings, Video Tours, Virtual Tours, Real Estate, Listings, agentcasts, real estate marketing

Posted in Blog, Real Estate Video Tours, Virtual Tours, Web 2.0, Real Estate Marketing, Real Estate Video News | No Comments »

Real Estate Video Tours Vs. Virtual Tours: Listings for the Web 2.0 World.

November 18th, 2007

by AgentCasts Administrator

Expo-nential Possibilities Buzzing Around the NAR conference…

I’m just settling back in after spending the past week at the NAR Expo in Las Vegas, where the real estate world was buzzing more heavily then ever about the possibilities which the evolving Web is opening up for agents and sellers who are actively marketing property listings online. Everywhere we wandered at the Expo we overheard alot of exciting talk about real estate video tours, blogging, social networking, and just about everything in-between. The air was full of excitement about the potential that is starting to infiltrate the real estate industry, and many vendors seemed to be attempting to support the shift either directly or indirectly with their product offerings. However, despite the obvious conceptual push in this direction, we were pretty surprised at some of the important points which were not being addressed which could immediately help property sellers to directly leverage the benefits of ‘Web 2.0′ efficiently without changing their whole game. As such, I’d like to quickly touch on a topic that sits pretty close to home - the difference between virtual tours and video tours, and how a simple shift from the traditional virtual tour to the video and podcasting formats can make a huge difference in effectively leveraging social media with your real estate listings.

After talking to countless agents who were all actively looking to embrace new marketing tools online, we noticed that many of them simply didn’t realize that web video was as easy to get started with as it really is. Most seemed to think that a virtual tour was the ‘inexpensive option’, while video was a more complex and expensive tool which sort of evaded their immediate understanding. However, after about 3 minutes of explaining the simple points of differentiation and describing how a ‘virtual tour’ could easily be produced into a web video compatible format, I was able to get almost everyone I spoke with excited about real estate video. This was not because I was able to (or even attempting to) prove that ‘true video’ was somehow more effective or useful then still photos strung together as a virtual tour (even though it just may be!), but rather because I was able to show them how a virtual tour formatted as video could help them to pull in the benefits of Social Media and Web 2.0 without requiring a major overhaul in their current methods or marketing budget allowances.

Virtual Tours or Video Tours? How about both!

A virtual tour is typically produced by stringing together still images of a property in a slide-show like manner, and is typically ‘locked’ to an proprietary interface which is unique to the virtual tour provider (and not at all geared for web syndication or seamless integration with your own websites). Additionally, most virtual tours attempt to display a faux-panoramic view of the property by stitching images together to show a 360 degree perspective (which many agree isn’t all that flattering, in all truth). I’m sure most of you have seen a virtual tour by now, and if you have you know exactly what I’m talking about. Many agents seem to migrate to these as a method of presenting a better view of their listings then photos alone, with the price-point being a key component of their decision making process.

A video tour created from your still photos, however, offers you the same benefits in terms of presentation that a virtual tour offers (and then some), with all of the rewards which Web video delivers available under the hood. You see, we here at AgentCasts don’t necessarily think that true, full motion video (professionally shot with a video camera) is what most agents necessarily need in order to stand out online, reach their customers and sell their properties faster. We rather suggest that using a web video compatible format for your virtual tours is the important point of distinction here. By creating your virtual tours as videos that can be streamed on the Web and posted directly on your own websites, blogs, and property listing pages, you gain access to all of the buzz-worthy benefits video has to offer in terms of SEO, marketing reach, and visibility online - and this can be achieved for a price as inexpensive (or even less!) then many traditional virtual tours offer on the Web. It’s simply a matter of a slight technological adjustment in the way your property tours are produced, one that we have addressed directly since day one here at AgentCasts.

Of course, we feel that ‘true video’ is highly appealing and will likely become the standard for property presentations online over the next few years, but we do not see this as an immediate requirement for leveraging the benefits of web video and social media in any honest practical sense. In truth, we admittedly feel that video tours created from still photos pack the just same punch in terms of the ‘true need’ which is being displayed by the masses looking to ’step up’ in the online real estate industry, and as such we offer our photo-based video tours as the ‘Virtual Tour 2.0′ to supply the most relevant rewards instantly to your business. If you’re currently using virtual tours and want to make an easy shift to the countless advantages which web-compatible (and iPod / iPhone / portable device compatible!) video has to offer, a video tour created from your listing images will certainly get you there - without having to book a videographer, and without having to stretch or increase your marketing budget at all.

So if you’ve been craving the advantages of real estate video but have been drawn-in by the instant gratification of virtual tours, there’s a middle-ground solution to consider which deliver the benefits of both that you can leverage right away. A virtual video tour produced from your photos will get your listings in video format on your website, YouTube, iTunes, and anywhere else you’d like to be online for less then $100 per property. If you want true video, we offer that too, of course with AgentCasts Local - but in all honesty, what most of you need right now is to begin presenting your properties in ‘rich media format’ on the Web so that you can be found where the masses are now searching and provide better property presentations for your customers online. A photo based video tour gives you just that, without the formatting limitations of a typical virtual tour and for a price that can be easily justified by just about anyone who wants to market a property listing on the web. Why be limited by the restrictions of a traditional virtual tour when an option now exists that supplies much greater flexibility and an exponential increase in visibility online for the same or a similar price-point? There’s not one reason I can honestly think of!

Technorati: real estate video, real estate video tours, real estate videos, virtual tours, home tours, property listings, virtual video tours, real estate tours, real estate marketing, agentcasts, photo tours, virtual tours of homes, Realtors Expo

Posted in Blog, Real Estate Video, Real Estate Video Tours, Virtual Tours, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Real Estate Video Tours on the CBS Evening News - Tonight, 6:30PM EST!

October 24th, 2007

by AgentCasts Administrator

CBS Evening News - Real Estate Video Tours

Tonight, the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric will be running a piece on employing creative real estate marketing techniques to help overcome this particularly slow market. They will be focusing on the use of real estate video tours as a solution to help agents market their listings, and we’re quite excited to hear what they have to say (to say the least!).

The spot will run on the CBS Evening News on Wednesday, October 24th 2007 at 6:30PM EST (today) - don’t miss it!

Big thanks to Fred Light of Nashua Video Tours for pointing this out to us a few days ago. He will actually be featured in the segment, and will be shown taping a house in Leominster, MA for one of his clients. Very cool - congratulations Fred.

We suspect that this ‘prime time’ piece (right before the World Series) will seriously help to raise the general population’s awareness about the value of using video tours to market their real estate listings, and cannot wait to hear exactly what they have to say. Tune in - this is a great opportunity to hear this information from a reputable source other then a video tour provider (like ourselves), so we hope that you will all be watching!

**Update: I was just informed that this is now being postponed due to coverage of the wildfires raging through San Diego. I’ll post the revised date and time on this blog as soon as we receive the details.

Technorati: real estate, video tours, real estate marketing, real estate video, CBS evening news, Real Estate news, agentcasts

Posted in Blog, Real Estate Video, Real Estate Video Tours, Virtual Tours, Real Estate Marketing, Real Estate Video News | No Comments »

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How to Create a Quality Real Estate Video Tour - For Under $100

Enhance Your Real Estate Listings with Google Street View Images!

Real Estate Video Tours Vs. Virtual Tours: Listings for the Web 2.0 World.

Expo-nential Possibilities Buzzing Around the NAR conference…

Virtual Tours or Video Tours? How about both!

Real Estate Video Tours on the CBS Evening News - Tonight, 6:30PM EST!

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