Ever look for a house or an apartment online?
It’s like living death.
Endless lists of homes with pretty much the same photographs and information.
Yet real estate is something everyone does at least once in their life, if not more, and when they do it they are prepared to spend vast sums of money and commit to a place for decades. It’s one of those really big events, like a wedding, that you put a lot of effort into.
That being the case, it’s surprising that most real estate sites are so terrible.
What is lacking in them is any sense of story.
There is nothing that differentiates one real estate site from the next; nothing that ‘connects’ me to the site, nothing that makes me feel like I can trust the agent – I don’t even know who the agent is.
OK.
The sites all have photos of the agents on them, like this one:
This if from Corcoran
Come on!
This looks like a page from my High School yearbook at Lawrence High School (and I graduated in 1972 for crying out loud).
Real estate is ripe for a revolution.
A video revolution.
Make me care about the agent. Connect me to him or her. Make me trust them, believe in what they tell me, make them a welcome guest in my home.
It’s what TV does.
Ever watch HGTV? Ever watch House Hunters?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOo7YAinyXg[/youtube]You sit there for a full half hour watching three houses that you have no intention of buying or really even care about. Yet you sit there and at the end, you can get into a heated debate with your spouse over which house ‘they’ will buy. “2! no 3!, It’s going to be 3!’
And why? Why do you sit through a half hour (or more) of this? Because House Hunters has taken real estate and turned it into the kind of storytelling that we can all relate to. It’s got a plot. It’s got characters. It’s got an arc of story. It’s got tension. It’s got a climax (which house will they buy?) and it’s got a resolution!
If you can do with the the abstract and voyeuristic experience of someone else buying a house, don’t you think you can do it with YOU buying a house FOR REAL?
Of course you can.
Or rather, some smart real estate agency can, and will, and should. And do it online.
All the raw material is there. They just have to refocus the way that they process it for the public.
Ian Watt (whose video is above) is a real estate agent in Vancouver.
He’s started his own online video TV show www.ianwatt.ca
OK. It is not genius. It is messy. But there is something interesting going on here.
He’s making a connection with potential buyers in Vancouver. He’s a personality where the rest of them are, well, photos in a High School yearbook.
Done properly, he could probably own the Vancouver market.
3 Comments
steve June 25, 2010
i’m noting the continued move towards .com and away from .ca by more canadian firms- media included.
Rachelle June 25, 2010
So true! My friend Jim just did a quick video for his wife who is a Realtor. He shot it on his Cannon and borrowed my shotgun mic for audio. Not bad for his 1st video, eh?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqDKoMo6bXY
Kevin Smithfield June 24, 2010
The first realtor reminds me of Charlie from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. If you’re unfamiliar – here’s a perfect example – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47D9-U8hn5I
To be honest, I’m not really into him and the video. The video of him in a car with the kind of used-car salesman voice and not genuine tone turns me off.
Video might be able to get into this market at a large scale, but it really has to tell a story to be successful. Video and real estate have been married for a while, just watch some of the local TV stations on the weekend and they’ll have house tours. This isn’t anything new. But it hasn’t exploded in popularity, despite being broadcast in thousands of households.
If someone can tell a story and simulate what it would be like to live in the “dream” house, then there might be a market. But that takes a lot of effort, and as our Charlie-esque character said, there are hundreds of listings a week. You can’t make a hundred videos with amazing stories that make people dream about living in that house.
Is there a middle ground? Yes. But to make this really work, you have to get people to imagine living in the houses, not just shoot video.