YouTube and Real Estate

Create a YouTube account to easily display your listings and area information!

Real estate professionals have wholeheartedly adopted the Internet, with almost all having one or more websites or blogs.  Along with that, images have become a tool to attract site visitors and hold their attention while they’re on the site.

Many have been a bit slower in adopting video however.  In years past, this was probably partly due to the perceived difficulty in producing quality video.  However, these days almost every camera can produce quality video in high resolution.  So, technology has evolved past the “hardware” objection.

The other possible factor holding back many is the belief that Hollywood quality productions are required.  That’s simply not true, as the wild popularity of homemade video on YouTube has created an expectation of value without production gimmicks. More than one billion unique visitors view more than 6 billion hours of video each month on YouTube, and they’re simply wanting to be informed or entertained, or both.

The first question to ask yourself is why people arrive at your website.  Obviously if you’re doing your marketing right, they’re arriving to research real estate in your market area. Real estate isn’t a virtual product; it’s a real world very interesting and highly visual experience to view homes and land.  Why wouldn’t video be an even better tool for this than images alone?  And, it’s not just about individual homes, but neighborhoods as well.

Open your account – your Channel:  If you use any other Google products, you already have a YouTube account, as it’s owned by Google.  Enter you personal and real estate site information and you’ve created the place where your videos will reside.

Create Playlists and make videos:  Divide up your area into neighborhoods and interest topics like shopping or culture.  Create a Playlist for each and start taking short videos of neighborhoods, shopping destinations, museums, etc.  You’ll find that viewers of your videos will frequently come from searches on your area, so they will  be more likely to click and visit your site if real estate is one of their goals or areas of research.

If you check your traffic statistics, you’ll begin to see visits and pageviews from YouTube.

To learn more about creating a YouTube channel, click here.