Video in property management

GAI KROCZEK
Property manager,
Total Care Property Management

CAST A WIDER NET
We recognise that these days more and more people watch video on YouTube. In fact, over the last six months, on average, four billion videos were viewed on YouTube every day.

So why would we limit exposure of a property to a few exclusive real estate portals?

We understand that landlords want good quality, drama-free occupants and we’ve developed a program to capture a wider pool of tenants.

People today are very busy and prospective tenants may even be coming from interstate. Often, the only option available is to go to the viewing on a specific date or miss out! This may mean the landlord loses a potential dream tenant who doesn’t even make the shortlist.

Our video tours are just like having a friend walk through the property with a video camera, giving you a real-time feel of what it would be like to live there. These are not Hollywood blockbuster quality, nor are they meant to be. They simply give people a realistic feel for the property as if they were there themselves.

Most properties are only advertised with photos; if a picture tells a thousand words, how much more can a video tell?

One of our tenants, John, recently found one of our properties online and viewed the video walk-through tour.

It was just what he and his wife were looking for. They contacted a friend who came to the viewing, and, in turn, confirmed what the video showed. They then applied online.

While the viewing did produce other applications, John and his family proved to be the owner’s choice and they moved into the property on arriving from Melbourne. They are now happily established in their new home.

DION FLANAGAN
Property consultant,
Charlotte Peterswald for Property

NOT WORTH THE EFFORT
I myself have the option to use video, but I choose not to. It’s not just an opinion – from my personal experience, videos don’t add any value and they tend to be underutilised by the public.

If you go to realestate.com.au or any office’s website and see they have video, when you link through to YouTube you can see the views don’t reflect the interest in the property. You might have a few thousand views on a listing portal, but the YouTube video will have just six or seven.

On the back end of YouTube you can see how long viewers watched your video, and from personal experience, I believe the average time somebody watches a video of a property to be about five seconds. That’s an awful lot of time, money and resources being poured into giving half a dozen people a few seconds of footage – especially when they can get the same information from the photographs of the property.

Also, if the video isn’t done well it can do more harm than good, and seeing as most people in the real estate industry don’t have that skill set they have to get a professional company to do them. This is expensive, as well as time consuming. Not only do you need to fork out for the crew, but you need additional time to set up and record voiceovers for the video.

Some of these companies call themselves ‘film crews’ and can get pretty hoity-toity about themselves, making all the shots very professional when it’s really just a glorified slideshow.

Having said that, I do have a personal video blog – which I have to admit I haven’t updated in a while – that is purely a medium through which I can share my thoughts on issues in real estate, rather than trying to convince somebody that this property is for them.