"RealTOURS for REALtors" Real Estate Video Production and Promotion

Stats and Trends (The Web and Real Estate)

There were 9 Billion Videos Viewed Online in July 2007.
There are currently over 900 Million Internet Users.
25% of all Searches involve Real Estate and Finance.
90% of Agents and 80% of all Home Searches begin Online.
Nearly 80% of Internet searchers are for Multimedia and Video.

Nearly 70,000 new people are getting Internet access every day. Studies also show that the average homebuyer is also getting younger, and increasingly grew up with the Internet.

According to a study commissioned by the California Association of Realtors, Internet homebuyers were reported to be wealthier and purchasing more expensive homes. Internet homebuyers bought a median priced home of $452,000 while traditional buyers purchased a median priced home of $310,000.

In addition to the huge audience of excellent prospective clients, the Internet offers both convenience and cost effectiveness that traditional media cannot. Web sites are more engaging and informative than even the best brochures. Emails make it easier and cheaper to keep in touch with existing clients. You do not need to have a four or five-figure marketing budget to create a professional online presence.

Recent surveys have shown that over 80% of Internet users find web sites through search engines. Getting a high ranking in a popular search engine such as Google.com can literally double your traffic overnight.

Agents Seeing Success with Online Video

Online video is no flash in the pan, a recent report from eMarketer projects that in the US alone the number of online video viewers will rise from 114 million to 183 million over the next five years.

The bottom for real estate is that video will, in the short term, at least continue be a fringe search (at least compared to searches for skateboarding dogs and Diet Coke/Mentos experiments) - but getting ahead of the curve with video marketing is something that should be on all agents’ radar screens. The crowds are coming.

Together, higher broadband penetration and Flash are going to propel web marketing increasingly into things like video and interactive multimedia, much like we imagined could happen five years ago. What this means for real estate is there are going to be more and more ways to use these tools to market a home on the Internet. Especially high-end, multi-million dollar listings, where they typical have longer sales cycles and much more discerning buyers.

Right out the gates, Google tells us it’s indexing videos from YouTube, Yahoo, Metacafe, IFILM, Revver and Dailymotion - so in terms of syndication, all of these hosting providers should be on your radar. You’ll want to maximize your chances of being picked up in the search index by getting your videos to at least one of those providers. One thing is clear however, looking at the Google search results. Video search is fairly primitive right now. It is still largely dependent on key words or tags provided by the producer - it reminded me a bit of the way the text based search used to operate (remember all the emphasis on keywords in metatags on HTML pages?).

Google now gives Top Results for Multi Media and Video content.Nearly three out of four homebuyers now use the Internet as a tool when searching for a home, and those who use the Internet are more likely to use real estate professionals, according to a new survey by the National Association of Realtors®.

Video-sharing sites in particular are filling niches abandoned by YouTube, which is now owned by Google and had more than 25 million visitors last month.

Smaller start-ups that are not able, or willing, to be as diligent are seeing their audiences explode as users seek the more free-wheeling environment that typified YouTube's early days. Users post 9,000 new videos a day to Dailymotion, which had more than 1.3 million visitors in November, up more than 100 percent since May, according to the tracking firm ComScore Media Metrix.

Lost in the frenzy over the phenomenal numbers associated with YouTube (100 million videos streamed and 70,000 new clips posted daily), the corresponding possibilities these numbers conjured in the minds of advertisers anxious to find new ways to reach audiences and the widely held verdict that Yahoo and MSN had fallen even farther behind for failing to win YouTube's hand was the fact that the deal-making was not limited to just Google. The number two and three search engines also made moves, albeit less impressive ones than Google, to bolster their online video-sharing capabilities. Yahoo more quietly acquired Jumpcut, a provider of online video editing tools, which makes for a nice fit with its roster of other social media tools that includes the Flickr photo-sharing site and the bookmark-sharing site Del.icio.us. And both Yahoo and MSN have adopted an approach to online video that seems calculated to play to their strengths in local search. By posting locally specific news and entertainment clips (Yahoo with CBS news and MSN with MTVu), they also make in-roads into one of the last healthy bastions of the traditional news media.

I believe this is going to be the year that online video finally make an impact in real estate. The barriers to entry have largely disappeared and the reams of data that now exists now needs context. Video does just that. Realtors and brokers should start looking at how they can incorporate video into their marketing efforts, not only as a way to differentiate themselves from the competition, but as a way to bring greater value to their clients and to consumers.

This incremental increase is happening month by month, whereas the US figure is staying static. As Bob Ivins, managing director of comScore Europe, said: "The fact that more than three-quarters of the traffic to Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft is now coming from outside of the U.S. is indicative of what a truly global medium the Internet has become."

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Sampling of Web Traffic (Generated Content Sites) - Most Accept Video, Photos and Rich Media.

Myspace.com | 53,000,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors | 68,285,849 - Recent Monthly Visitors

YouTube.com | 23,825,526 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 32,000,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors

Facebook.com | 22,541,770 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 25,000,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors

Photobucket.com | 25,548,801 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 14,000,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors

Craigslist.org | 23,982,542 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 15,000,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors

Flickr.com | 23,643,614 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 9,700,000 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors

WordPress.com | 6,373,166 - Compete Monthly Visitors | 16,040,392 - Quantcast Monthly Visitors