Practical solutions for creating video property tours

We're big fans of online video at The Academy, but there is no denying that it can take some serious time and money to deliver professionally presented videos. When it comes to using online videos to market properties, it may not be practical for agents to have property tours shot and edited professionally unless it's for a seriously high priced instruction. However, there are a couple of websites that enable you to produce perfectly decent property tours without having to become the Scorsese of estate agency...

Thinkproperty.com introduced free tours provided by Idealhome.tv in January this year and has apparently enjoyed much longer pageview times on it's site since their introduction. A relatively simple web interface lets you combine your standard images of a property with text in a visually compelling template of various video effects over which you have a lot of control without needing the technical know-how.

The features that really bring these tours to life (music and voiceover) are available for an additional charge per property. Several agents have embraced this premium version of the tours to great effect on their own sites as this example from Jackson-Stops and Staff shows.

Another site that enables you to create tours is SpotMixer. This site actually gives you the ability to include a soundtrack and your own voiceover as part of their very reasonable subscription. They also enable you to download high resolution versions which you can use to show in your offices. SpotMixer is again an entirely web-based service that enables you to upload images and text. It also lets you include actual video footage in a tour.

Both of the sites combine ease of use with rich features and low cost to make video tours very accessible to agents. Of course, video tours aren't for every listing and if you choose to try this technology out, I would recommend selecting properties that you have a number of decent images for and ones for which you can provide a good narrative for the voiceover. The potential upsell to vendors for these tours could well prove lucrative to agents prepared to embrace this sort of technology.