As a realtor, getting paid high commission has its perks, but one of the reasons is because you need to market yourself and the homes you sell.
If done right, these expenses become assets that you can leverage throughout your career instead of liabilities that only impact the wallet.
Creating real estate videos can either be daunting or easy, but the reality is that creating effective videos begin with knowing the objective or purpose of the video first. Then comes planning, then shooting & editing.
Here are a few ideas of real estate videos we currently produce for realtors that work and why.
Video Ideas That Currently Work
There are a handful of videos that you can produce that will have a significantly longer shelf life than other videos. In other words, videos with a longer shelf life will live online beyond the lifespan of a listing, event announcement/recap, or market update.
For instance, a new listing video won’t last more than a few weeks before it becomes irrelevant content. Then the video will no longer have a use unless you repurpose it in your sales or buyer presentation to show what you do for your clients.
If your video has evergreen content and a clear call to action, then you’ll be able to leverage that video for as long as it’s published online.
Evergreen content is content that will rarely change like “how to prepare your home to sell”—that information will rarely change and if it does, then it won’t be for a very long time—thus that video content will work for you for months and years to come.
Another famous evergreen content is “how to buy a home”. This is pretty common, but again, if you provide comprehensive videos around this topic with a clear call to action to call you, then this video series will last months and years.
These are just two video topics you can go where you can take a deep dive into with a video series or a mini crash course of videos that you can distribute, but the crux of these examples is that they’re searchable content.
Searchable content will help you get found organically—or naturally—online without having to spend money for paid ads. This is a more longterm approach, so as long as you’re making evergreen content on an ongoing basis while doing your other things, the traffic and momentum will eventually pick up.
Video Slideshows
These videos use the home’s photos from the listing and is branded with you as the listing agent.
Though, these don’t have a clear CTA, these do show the value and marketing expertise you provide to any of your sellers.
These are great for social content and your website because they leverage existing content that is professionally edited.
Video Tours
These videos give potential buyers a walkthrough of the property and allows them to virtually see the home without having the inconvenience of taking time out of their day to see it.
The objective is show the buyer the home, show the seller your marketing angle for the home, and naturally attract other buyers and sellers that want to work with your personality.
These are great to get more exposure to the listing and more qualified buyers that won’t take up your time away from growing your business as well as inconvenience the seller from having to leave their home so often for the tire kickers.
These can also be used on your website blog post and portfolio for future listing presentations.
Video Walk Through
This is a comprehensive video tour featuring the agent and having them walk through the home with the viewer as though they are there in person.
These videos allows the agent to showoff their expertise as well as some of the key features that might not have been shared on the MLS listing.
These also are great, but have their downside in that it is branded and may not be allowed in certain MLS platforms.
With a clear call to action, you can feed your pipeline with potential buyers and sellers from your new listing.
Educational Videos
Education is the new selling—I feel—and is a great way to create content that will last longer than a listing.
These are more searchable online and will get you discovered faster and better than just a listing video.
The way we structure these allows us to have multiple calls to action (CTA), thus creating more content from the same video, but with a different purpose.
These videos are great for YouTube, Facebook, and your website—especially if you embed these videos on a blog article that goes more in depth on the topic(s) your video covers.
How to Structure Your Videos
Your videos should be structured, and if done right, you’ll be able to produce more videos quickly and efficiently when you follow the same structure time after time.
Because most people will see your videos online, there really isn’t a reason to introduce yourself in every video.
Before we go any further, here’s a generic outline you can follow that will help structure your videos. This simple step will make your video production more efficient as you move forward in creating video content.
The best way to kick off your video is to introduce the video topic, question, or anything that will let the viewer know what they’re about to watch.
Then go into your video explaining whatever it is you’re wanting to share, then end with a clear CTA.
Keep in mind that the explanation part of your video, or the video content, should be outlined with bullet points.
I have plenty of experience with people wanting to script out word for word what they will say in the video and it doesn’t come off as naturally as if they were to outline the video and speak using their own words.
Expect to redo parts of your video multiple times, THIS IS COMPLETELY NORMAL and is why we edit the video.
If you’re doing a live video or a video obviously shot on a cell phone, then the mistakes won’t matter as much.
A rule of thumb I go by is if the video is shot with a high end camera with lighting, then you do want to minimize the mistakes in your video. If the production is lower quality like a cell phone, then the mistakes are welcome and make you look more human.
The CTA should be focused on one or two ways for the viewer to get in contact with you like, call you, text you, email you, click on a link, or anything that they should do after they watch the video.
How to Shoot Your Real Estate Videos
Once you have outlined your video, press record and go straight down the outline.
You can shoot either from your cell phone or your webcam. Believe it or not, most of the videos above were shot on a cell phone.
Don’t spend a lot of time on the equipment, get your content out using the tools you already have.
What matters most are 2 things:
1 – Clear audio. If you don’t have professional audio gear, be sure to stay no more than an arm’s distance from your camera to get clear audio
2 – Story. If your content is valuable and you provide comprehensive instructions to your audience, then it doesn’t matter what quality the video image is because they’re watching you for the content, not what type of camera you’re using.
Doing it in this way will help you stay organized with your video content and systematically produce a large amount of videos for your real estate business.
How to Publish Your Videos
Publishing your videos may sound easy, but publishing content on your social media page is a lot harder than it seems because it may come off as narcissistic or that you may say something incorrectly only to get made fun of.
I totally get it, but here’s the reality, if you don’t publish and make mistakes, then you won’t come off as human. You need people to see that you are vulnerable and if people correct you because of something you said, that’s engagement and sets you up to engage back to foster that connection between you and the platform.
As for the narcissism, don’t publish your videos immediately, schedule them out so that you don’t have to worry about when it gets published.
This is a “softer” way to launch your content without having to be tied to the weeds of being in social media content at all hours of the day.
You can actually schedule out your content on most platforms and if you bulk schedule, then you can potentially get a few weeks scheduled at a time and not have to worry about the ball and shackles of social media