What is it about home tour that makes it beneficial for Real Estate Marketing?
I recognize today that 99% of houses are selling super fast in a day. So, maybe if you want to consider doing home tours today, you can actually shoot the video, before it goes live in DMLS. The day it goes out, you can have a whole bunch of marketing that you can be able to push out in an attempt to find yourself a buyer. If you’ve got the listing or if you have a team, maybe you can be able to give that to someone on your team, and have them post videos that do best on Facebook.
So these ideas are all for Facebook and for YouTube, everybody likes looking at home tours. One great example now is where my inspiration comes from, MTV Cribs. So, who remembers MTV cribs?
MTV Cribs
Back in the day, this was like probably in the late nineties, early two thousands, MTV cribs was super popular and that’s where the inspiration for our videos come from. If you think about cribs, they didn’t show you every nook and cranny of the house. They will just show you the highlights.
The one thing they always showed you was inside of the refrigerator. And I’m not saying that you have to show the inside of your client’s refrigerator, but that was just like the shtick of MTV cribs. They always just show what’s in the celebrities. What’s in the celebrities refrigerator. So Prince is a cool example.
So Ja Rule was on MTV cribs and it turned out it wasn’t even his house.
It was a rented house. He just rented the house for the weekends, had the film crew come in, shoot the video, and when they aired it, the owners saw the video, sue MTV, it basically got taken down. But it’s just a funny episode because you see Ja Rule walking around and try to claim this house. It was never even his house.
So we’re going to just be inspired by cribs. We’re going to make our own versions of those videos. So here’s a couple of tips, if you’re going to go shoot a cribs tour.
Cribs (Home Tours) Tips
Number one is again today, obviously I recognize the market is insane in terms of how fast houses are selling. So if you’re going to be doing anything like this, you almost have to get the listing agreement signed, get all your marketing prepared so that the day it goes live, you can have a big push happening, in order to still get benefit from that listing.
It’s not just selling the house because that was the thing. Traditionally, if a house took, let’s say two weeks or a month or two months to sell, you had all that time to capture buyers. And you know, you have a lot of other benefits. You still want to try to figure out how can you get those benefits.
With my style of doing cribs tours, it takes two people, one person to run the phone or the camera and one person to, to actually be talking and running the tour.
So as a realtor, find a battle buddy, your battle buddy should be somebody that helps you out when you need help. Then you help them when they need help, right? If you guys are going on vacation, they’re showing your clients and vice-versa. Get a listing, they come over and help you shoot your cribs tour and you guys go grab lunch afterwards or whatever.
Starting home tours video
At the beginning of the tour, don’t make people watch the whole video in order to get the basics. So, when you can stand at the front of the house, I got the front door and be like;
“What’s going on? I’m Nick, let’s go take a look at this house that just got listed here in Arlington, Texas. This is a three bedroom, two bath house, 1,850 square feet. Let’s go take a look”
Then now you go in, so that way people who have no cares about a house like that or whatever, especially if you’re talking about buyers, then you know, they don’t have to watch the whole video to get some of the basics.
Just hit them with some of the small basics right up front, not necessarily the price. I think you can hold the price for the end or don’t even give the price on the video.
“Hey, if you want to know the current price comment on this video, wherever you’re seeing it right now, we’ll make sure you get that price right away” or “Call me at this number. If you want the price.”
I don’t think you have to give it on the video. I like doing this as just one long shoot. So if you can, go in the house, preplan your route, I’m going to go in from the front door, I’m going to go to the kitchen after the kitchen, I’m going to go to the master bedroom after that, I’m going to show the game room and then we’re going to end in the backyard.
Have a route, so you pretty much have a plan and ideally just make it one long video. If you shoot a bunch of short videos and you reshoot all this stuff, you got to get into editing and all that. That’s where people struggle.
And that’s why people don’t make videos. Cause you gotta do, you know, all this technical labor in the background and it sucks.
Home Tours on Facebook Live
So this is a perfect Facebook live video right here, just preplan the route so that it flows well. And if you babble, who cares, you know, it’d be like, “Oh wait, that’s not what I meant to say; I meant to say this.” And you just keep the party moving.
If you do one long shoot, definitely better than short shoots where you have to edit and do technical stuff later, because if you have to do that, we can both be honest and say, it’s probably not going to happen. And that’s one of the reasons, you know, one of the roadblocks for most people of shooting videos is who’s going to edit it and make it look fancy.
Keep going…
I’m more of a guerrilla marketing style. I just go Facebook live or shoot quick cell phone videos and not worrying as much about the production quality, as much as the message. The message is more important than the production quality in most cases. Okay. Look, if you make a mistake, like I just said, keep going.
That’s the best thing about being Facebook live. So we got the home tour idea. If you don’t, if you’ve never watched MTV cribs, or you need a refresher go to YouTube and just watch a couple, couple episodes of MTV cribs, right. There’ll be like 20 minutes each episode and just check out how they did it. You know, it was awesome content, really engaging high quality.
You can do the same thing with listings, your listings. Other people’s listings. As long as you have permission, new construction, there’s a lot of options. If you’re a new agent and you don’t have any listings right now, go and start making video tours of new construction, right? I mean, there’s other ways that you can find business besides having your own listings.