Video now key marketing tool for high-end property

Is your house ready for its closeup?
In today’s digital real estate marketplace, clearing the clutter and bringing in a professional photographer is often just the start of many marketing efforts.
To entice buyers with storytelling, video has been thrust into the sales process and brought Hollywood-style productions into colonials and condos across New England.
Over the past decade, many brokerages have assembled in-house video-teams, equipped them with the latest digital cameras and editing software, and put them at the disposal of agents with high-profile listings.
Along with hosting showings, those agents are now narrating voiceovers and directing exterior scenes of the neighborhood that will later be cut together and posted on the Internet.
“The days when people would meet with a client, look at the house, sign listing forms and put it on the market the next day – those days are over,” said Sally Lapides, president and owner of Residential Properties Ltd. in Providence, one of the first locally owned agencies to embrace video. “You can talk about lifestyle and the community as well as how many bedrooms it has.”
Residential Properties has two full-time videographers, both graduates of New England Institute of Technology, who shoot, edit, record audio and post videos as part of its six-employee IT department. Lapides does most of the voiceovers.
Real estate agencies began to dabble with video as digital cameras became common in the early 2000s. The technology improved and became less expensive at around the same time print advertising began being replaced as the primary medium for listings by the Internet, which provided a platform for multimedia.
As videos became more common, they became more sophisticated with background music, meticulous staging, gallery lighting and carefully composed tracking shots that draw a viewer across a room or from the street toward the front door.
Most videos glide gently through a home, with the afternoon sun shining through the windows and tree leaves quietly rustling. Some extremely large and opulent houses have videos pushing four or five minutes.
“Agents are getting extremely creative and some of these videos are looking more like Hollywood productions,” said Davenport Crocker Jr., regional vice president for Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in New England. “Where in the early years you mostly entered a room and maybe [saw] a panorama, now they are getting more cinematic and really tell a story.” Coldwell Banker New England has 10 full-time employees in its “visual imaging department” and works with freelancers to shoot video in places further afield.
Crocker said Coldwell Banker is now adding floor plans to its videos that help orient the viewer to exactly where in the house the camera is taking them.
And in the near future, he said interactive technology will allow the viewer to download interior images, such as a furniture set, so a prospective buyer could see how their dining-room set might look in a particular listing.
In addition to the content, real estate agencies have found that videos significantly enhance a listing’s place in search engines, in some cases jumping over giant Web sites like Zillow and Trulia to the top of a Google page.
Videos are still more likely to be employed for high-end houses than more modest ones, but both Coldwell Banker and Residential say they have no price floor and agents decide whether a listing would benefit from a video or not.
Residential Properties currently has videos for 75 properties posted on its website and, while the majority are seeking much more than the Rhode Island median single-family sale price, there are a few more affordable houses with videos, such as a three-bedroom in North Providence listed for $150,000.
Of course, making a video of a house requires the cooperation of the seller who, in many cases, still lives there and may not be willing or capable of doing the staging necessary for a video.
Randall Realtors President Mike Schlott said his Charlestown-based company doesn’t have a dedicated video team but works extensively with video contractors to make videos for some of its premier properties.
Schlott said Randall’s sister company Kinlin Grover Real Estate on Cape Cod has made videos for many of the towns there, something he intends to do for Rhode Island’s communities.
If there is caution to be exercised in real estate videos, Schlott said it was to resist using the camera to make a house out to be something it isn’t.
“You have to make sure the video tells the true story of the property and represent it for what it is,” Schlott said. “You don’t want to take a house on one-quarter acre and make it look like it is sitting on two acres.” •

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