Visit Doug Devitre’s Web site (www.DougDevitre.com) and the St. Louis-based broker-salesperson at Prudential Alliance, REALTORS®, greets you and explains his site.

He points over his shoulder to the links at the top of the page, to his right to links on the side, and then to a form you can fill out to receive a free CD-ROM.

Devitre’s greeting isn’t in the form of a paragraph of copy or static photos. Rather, he’s created a video of himself that launches when you arrive at his Web page. After the video loads, which takes about two seconds, you see a miniature cut-out image of him superimposed on the site. After his 30-second message, he disappears from the screen, and you’re free to roam his site.

Devitre, CRS®, e-PRO®, is one of a growing number of salespeople using video to build their brand. Jim Pasala, with Coldwell Banker Previews International, and Amber Downey, with Surterre Properties, both in Newport Beach, Calif., use similar technology on their Web sites, www.PasalaGroup.com and www.amberdowney.com. The two often team up to sell luxury homes, and in addition to displaying video of themselves on their personal sites, they’ve created Web sites, such as www.lagunabeachretreat.com, to spotlight some of their listings. There they show their personal video as well as streaming video of the property’s features. Professional voice talent explains each image the viewer sees.

“The strength of video is that it has sight, sound, and motion,” says Greg Herder, CEO of Hobbs Herder Advertising in Newport Beach, Calif. “TV is such a powerful medium because it creates a much stronger emotional punch than any other form of marketing. Whether you’re talking about kids in Africa or about homes as a salesperson, you can make a much stronger case through video.”

Brand awareness spreads “like wildfire”

Video helps you build your brand in several ways, the most important by showing consumers you’re ahead of the curve, a point Pasala stresses in listing presentations. Video also helps you differentiate your brand. “Nobody [else] in my market does video, and it’s something people remember you by,” says Devitre. “Word of mouth spreads like wildfire, especially when something’s different or cutting-edge. The word of mouth on my video has been through the roof.”

He says he gets at least one lead each day from serious buyers visiting his Web site. Although he can’t concretely attribute that steady source of qualified leads to the video, he says, “people tell me they love it.”

Devitre used a professional production team to create the greeting video (for $150). Hosting is included in the Outoftheboxagent.com package he purchased. He also uses a webcam to create other videos at his site. The webcam was about $65, and he pays about $20 extra monthly to his Web host for the bandwidth to support video.

Melissa Crockett Willis, a salesperson with Howard Hanna Smythe Cramer in Mentor, Ohio, and a partner in The Crockett Team, says video helps her team build its brand as a forward-thinking group that provides personal service. The team has loaded an eight-minute video onto its Web site, www.thecrockettteam.com, in which members introduce themselves and explain how they’ll help consumers. The video introductions make each meeting with consumers “more of a friendly, warm appointment,” she says. “It’s as if Matt Lauer of the Today Show walked in the room right now; I’d feel as if I knew him.

“We look at how business will be done two years from now and we do it today,” adds Crockett Willis. “We want to be the ones setting the pace.” The video cost about $5,000 to create; occasional updates run about $500.

“We’re probably up 40 to 50 transactions each year since we started using video three years ago,” she says.

April 27, 2007

If the house on Jessup Lane in Westhampton Beach could talk, it might be heard uttering Norma Desmond’s famous movie line, “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”

Broker Loretta Besser recently worked with Hal Kench of HK Web Productions to create a customized three-minute video home tour that shows every room in the house and features narration with a classical music soundtrack.

Kench has uploaded the streaming video to YouTube .com and WellcomeMat.com and posted it to Besser’s Web site, the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island, as well as Real tor.com, HREO.com, CraigsList .com and PropertiesoftheHamp tons.com, and his own site, HamptonHomeTours.com.

With more than 70 million videos seen on YouTube daily, Besser says she believes Web-based video tours are the wave of the future and a winning marketing strategy. “It makes a house come alive for prospective buyers,” says Besser, who burned DVD copies of the Jessup Lane video and handed them out like candy at weekly open houses. “It eliminates wasted walk-throughs,” she says, “and hopefully will shorten the time a house is on the market.” The house was just rented for the summer, so she’ll continue to distribute the DVDs after the property goes back on the market after Labor Day.

Besser, whose firm, Loretta Besser Real Estate, is based in Centereach, says she thinks her strategy will be helpful for weary house hunters who’ve traipsed through a dozen open houses to visually remember her listing on Jessup Lane.

“In today’s market there’s an abundance of inventory out there, and you have to do everything in your power to give a house the proper exposure – whether it’s a $300,000 house or a $2-million estate,” she says.

Targeting Net-savvy buyers

According to a survey last year conducted by the National Association of Realtors, a record 80 percent of home buyers are now using the Internet to search for a home. And 24 percent of those surveyed say they first learned about the home they eventually purchased through the Internet.

While real estate Web sites have been using digital photos and 360-degree panoramic tours to showcase listings for several years, Kench says this approach falls short of what a video tour with motion-picture quality can offer home buyers.

“My motto is, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words,’ but video tours sell homes. With a video tour you get a true picture of every square inch of the house and its flow.”

Kench came up with the idea for his business while on a three-year deployment with the Army Reserves in upstate Fort Drum. Working midnight shifts alone in his patrol car, he says, he remembered his own house-hunting experience in 2003, when he and his wife bought their first house in Center Moriches.

“The online tours we saw were very cartoonish and had distorted images that the computer stitched together from photographs,” he says of the spinning, fishbowl effect often experienced on 360-degree tours. “I knew there had to be a better way to show the entire house.”

Once back home, Kench, a technology education teacher in the East Islip school district by day, began experimenting with his “basic camcorder, bare-bones PC and Windows Movie Maker software,” using his own house as his guinea pig. He then invested $9,000 in upgraded computer, software, camera and lighting equipment and began marketing his services. By January 2006 he had landed his first client, Fillmore Real Estate, an agency with 20 offices in Brooklyn and Staten Island.

Soon he was getting calls from agents like Patrick McLaughlin of Prudential Douglas Elliman’s Sag Harbor office, who wanted to do videos for his multimillion-dollar listings in the Hamptons.

“I love that it’s a streaming video, which is more fluid for people to see,” says McLaughlin. “I wouldn’t give you two cents for those 360-tours that freeze on your computer. As an ex-television producer, I know how important good visuals are.”

McLaughlin also gives high marks to Kench’s wife, Rachel, a former journalist at an NBC-TV affiliate in Maine who writes the scripts (using the MLS broker sheets and any other information provided by an agent) and narrates them. (Besser prefers to do her own narration.)

More brokers use service

McLaughlin helped spread the word among his colleagues, and now Prudential is Kench’s biggest customer. Working with six freelance videographers, Kench films home tours on Long Island and New York City – averaging 10 to 15 shoots a week – with the lion’s share of his business based in the Hamptons.

He counts The Corcoran Group, RE/Max, Coldwell Banker, Hampton Estates Realty and Curto and Curto home builders among his clients. Most homes are listed for more than $1 million.

Toni Curto, an owner with Southampton-based Curto and Curto, says she’s “thrilled with the results” so far. A video was completed in mid-February, and she says she’s gotten four calls from prospective buyers, which she considers a “tremendous response given the market and the fact that it was winter.” She says she tried it as an experiment and definitely plans on using it again to showcase other homes they build.

Enzo Morabito, a broker who represents luxury properties on the North and South forks for Prudential Douglas Elliman, says, “The exposure you get online is phenomenal. Money spent on advertising in magazines and newspapers is important for branding yourself, but it doesn’t generate the calls like a Web site. People want the sensory experience, so I’ve gone to video with that in mind.”

A virtual walk-through

“I have clients who find their house on the Internet and then call me,” adds Louise Pitlake from Prudential’s Merrick office. “Up to that point we’ve never met. Basically they pick out their own homes.”

Lynn November from Prudential’s Westhampton Beach office is another advocate of video home tours. But when she wants to showcase a listing for an oceanfront home – and really show prospective buyers the pounding surf and sunny Hamptons sky – she spends her marketing dollars on Online WalkThru, a media production company with offices in Connecticut and upstate New York.

Eric Carlsen, who owns the 2-year-old company, specializes in creating high-definition “mini-documentaries” for the luxury real estate market ($3 million and up) in the tristate area. Carlsen and his crew will spend a half day lighting, staging and filming a home to give it a “refined, HGTV feel.” The resulting two- to three-minute video includes an agent interview, professional voice-over and music. Clients also receive 10 DVDs, which can be customized with the broker’s information, floor layouts, still photos and community attractions. The basic cost is $1,500, which includes linking the video to Web sites.

Kent Rydberg, a former senior vice president at Corcoran’s Westhampton Beach office, used Online WalkThru for several of his listings and plans to use it in his new role as manager of Prudential’s Westhampton Beach and Quogue offices.

“The beauty of it in terms of value is that when you invest in a video, it’s available to the entire world 24/7. There’s no shelf life – until the home is sold,” he explains, adding that he shows the DVD when making new listing presentations. “As an agent, it really helps separate you from the competition.”

Early on, Kench learned his lesson not to put prices in the videos, because if a price is reduced, he has to make time-consuming edits. Instead, the price information is available through the agent or agency’s Web site for that particular listing. Online WalkThru also does not put prices in videos.

Paul Brennan, Prudential’s Hamptons regional manager based in the Bridgehampton office, says that by July the company will be offering its agents an in-house option for video home tours. Amanda Switzer, a producer, director and videographer who runs Into the Woods Productions in East Hampton, is working with the company to revamp its Web site and create streaming “village videos” so that potential buyers can learn more about a neighborhood or town. Agents can choose to work with Switzer to create video home tours for their listings and have them showcased under the village banners.

By next month Kench says he’ll be offering video podcasts of the home tours, which can be downloaded to an iPod, cell phone or other portable device.

“Imagine how convenient it will be for an agent to have all their home tours right in their pocket,” Kench says. “It’s just another way to stay ahead of the curve in this competitive industry.”On the cover

Lathe Poland and Eric Carlsen of Online Walkthru film a Coldwell Banker Prestigious Properties broker at a Southampton listing.

Copyright (c) 2007, Newsday, Inc.

That’s the latest promise of the phenomenally popular Internet video site and its brethren, where, in addition to viewing such cultural treasures as wedding bloopers and clips from “The Simpsons,” you can shop for real estate these days.

From slick, cinematic productions touting waterfront castles to underlit, homemade tours of modest condos, real-estate marketers are eyeing online video as the next way to capture that increasingly elusive creature, the home buyer.

“I was thinking about that somebody who’s just scrolling through [video sites] late at night and types in the words `real estate’ and `Chicago’ and says, `Let’s see what pops up,’” said Dina Davis, a Coldwell Banker agent in Evanston who made a video of a Rogers Park townhouse listing and stuck it on YouTube.com.

After two months and a paltry 45 viewings, the townhouse is still available.

“I didn’t think we’d get tons of business from it,” Davis said. “It’s another avenue, another option for marketing. I just hoped to pique someone’s interest.”

Still, the experience has whet her appetite and she’s preparing another video tour of an Evanston condo.

Once posted, it will find itself increasingly in crowded company: Analysts say the practice, though in its infancy, is beginning to boom and new sites are vying to become “the YouTube of real estate.”

Just how many real estate videos are claiming a spot in cyberspace is hard to quantify because such general-interest video meccas as YouTube and Yahoo don’t have a category for them. House-hunters must cull the videos from millions of other clips by typing in search terms.

That may be about to change.

“I think 2007 will be the year video breaks out,” said Joel Burslem, marketing director for a Portland, Ore., brokerage and host of a popular industry blog, Future of Real Estate Marketing (www.futureofrealestatemarketing.com).

Burslem cites the increasing accessibility of video technology just as the real estate boom was beginning to fade and the industry was scratching for ways to attract attention.

At the same time, the major search engines, including YouTube’s parent, Google, are emerging as players in hosting real estate listings and property-mapping tools. Designating a category for real estate videos would be a natural complement, he said.

Burslem expects the video sites to create such “channels” dedicated to real estate content, perhaps even by specific brokerages through special marketing agreements.

“I don’t think it will be too long before you can upload a video to your listing on Google Base and have it searchable on Google Real Estate,” Burslem said. “I don’t think that’s out of the realm of possibility at all.”

YouTube spokesman Aaron Ferstman said he couldn’t comment on specific plans for either site, but he said online video exposure has an obvious appeal in real estate.

“When a [real estate agent] puts it on YouTube, it’s being broadcast to the world,” he said.

It’s not, however, being broadcast in a consistent form.

For the most part, the videos aren’t the familiar “virtual tours”–the 360-degree scans that have inhabited brokerage sites for a decade or so.

Many of the current videos are a few minutes of digital footage shot by a videographer–or a real estate agent or homeowner–strolling room to room.

At one end of that scale are videos on a par with Davis’: a walk-through embellished with such subtitles as “Living Room” and the agent’s contact information. In Davis’ townhouse presentation, there’s no narration, just dubbed-in background music from a jazz ensemble.

Davis’ production costs are the camera and several hours of her time, she said.

Others pull out the stops. Professional videographer Malachi Leopold found himself being hoisted by a hydraulic lift last year to capture the second-story view that a buyer of an oceanfront lot in Massachusetts would get after building on it.

Later, Leopold, who heads the Left Brain/Right Brain production company in Chicago, also shot footage of the countryside and streets of a nearby town to provide local flavor, he said.

After the video went up on several Web sites, it was spotted by someone in California who bought the property, Leopold said.

Leopold put more than two full workdays into the project. He declined to specify his earnings, but speculated that real estate agents would expect to pay $1,000 to $3,500 for such efforts–perhaps $5,000 or more, depending on the complexity, a factor that would limit polished videos to high-end properties.

Not all videos are live-action. Those of the 40 to 50 listings posted by the Real Living Helios brokerage in Chicago are essentially elaborate slide shows of still photography, stitched together with visual effects and voiceover narration.

Because they are video podcasts, consumers can subscribe to them and download them onto their computers, Web-enabled phones or iPods, according to brokerage principal Joe Magliochetti. He said his firm submits the videos to about 60 sites and podcast-specific directories and described production costs as “nominal.”

And they’re getting results, he said. “We can attribute approximately 10 percent of our Web site traffic to the various podcasting directories,” Magliochetti said. The firm’s video vendor estimates that each Real Living Helios podcast episode averages 115 viewings a month.

“We believe these people are actively looking for more information about properties, which means they are more likely to be a ready buyer,” he said.

One thing that’s holding real estate video back, say those who aren’t terribly impressed, is picture resolution, which is critical in marketing homes. Mega sites such as YouTube compress data to accommodate huge numbers of videos, so picture quality tends to be less than stellar.

“They’re not `real estate great,’” said Christian Sterner, co-founder of WellcomeMat.com, dubbed “the YouTube of real estate” when it launched last year.

“We’re going to be a venue of choice because we have nothing but [realty] video,” Sterner said. In addition to offering higher resolution, WellcomeMat videos are embeddable on brokerages’ home pages, so real estate companies can show off their videos without sending shoppers to other sites.

Its beta version hosts videos for free (though its search function is inactive temporarily while it’s being revamped, Sterner said), but eventually will charge agents a monthly fee.

“In a time of market flattening and rising inventories [of homes for sale], people need to do whatever they can,” said Sterner.

By Les Christie, CNNMoney.com staff writer
March 2 2007

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Nearly 80 percent of home buyers start their search on the Internet – soon they’ll have more to look at.

On its Web site, the Peninsula on Indian River Bay development in Delaware has begun using high-quality, television news-style presentation to sell homes. On the site, viewers take interactive tours of the property, led by two on-line hosts, through different site “channels.”

According to Roland Varesko, president of Ecendent Interactive, the production company that put together Peninsula’s site, nobody is doing this on as grand a scale as the Peninsula. “It’s like having your own TV show,” he says.

But the trend is sure to spread. Even now, the economics are such that a development of 50 to 100 homes could afford a Web site like Peninsula’s, according to Varesko. And big real estate brokers, such as Century 21, Coldwell Banker (both part of Realogy) and Re/Max, are quickly ramping up.

“I believe streaming videos on Web sites is the wave of the future,” says Charlie Young, vice president for marketing for broker Coldwell Banker.

Sites are already getting souped-up. “A year ago,” Young says, “we were telling all our brokers about the need to put more [still] photos on their Web sites.” Today, if your site doesn’t offer virtual tours, mapping technology, neighborhood guides and a video library of buying and selling tips, it’s nowhere.

Young connects the whole trend to the YouTube phenomenon, where seemingly everyone in America is making and posting their own videos. Putting together even an elaborate site like Peninsula’s is not expensive. The project’s developer, Larry Goldstein, says it cost only about $50,000.

As a matter of fact, compared to more traditional forms of marketing, such as newspaper advertising, the site is a bargain and more efficient. “Our market is so broad,” says Goldstein, “from New York City through New Jersey, Philadelphia and the D.C. area, so how do you pick and choose where to put your ad money?”

Such salesmanship is also a way of differentiating your development from the competition. “Before, everything was focused on the transaction,” Young says. “Today, it’s all about how to engage the consumer. Consumers control the up-front process and have all the information and tools they need to do a large part of the real estate agents’ jobs themselves.”

The Peninsula Web site is hosted by a genial pair of professional spokespersons, one male and one female. They lead users through a virtual tour of the development’s offerings, including its neighborhoods, home styles, nearby beaches and features and amenities, including a Jack Nicklaus designed golf course. Using video makes the site much more arresting.

“The main point of the site is to be video driven,” says Varesko, “It’s more inviting, more engaging for users.”

“It’s been very successful for us,” says Goldstein, who is able to gauge the interest by the e-mail feedback of viewers.