Despite the increased emphasis on virtual tours because of stay-at-home orders, Zillow continues to stymie those of us who want to provide narrated video tours of our listings.
Unlike our MLS — and most other MLSs around the country — Zillow does not let us link a YouTube video to our listings on their platform. Zillow gets those links from our MLS but does not display them. Instead it wants agents to become Premier Agents (which costs money) and then makes agents use a Zillow app to shoot a walk-through video using their smartphone.
That walk-through is limited to 2 minutes and does not carry sound, which is ridiculous, since the whole point of a walkthrough is for the agent to point out the features of the home. “Don’t worry about barking dogs,” we are advised, “since your video won’t have any sound.” Isn’t that comforting?
In my opinion, there is simply no substitute for a narrated long-form video tour of a listing. We’re told that videos should be short to match the short attention span of online lookie-loos, but I do the videos for people who like what they see in the description and photographs and want to take a deeper dive into the features of a home before seeing it.
Last month I sold a $1,250,000 home in the foothills to a couple from Washington, DC, who never saw the home in person. They had a daughter look at it in person, but they only had my 18-minute video tour to go by before signing the contract. They didn’t even come for the inspection or closing. And that’s not the first such instance of a Golden Real Estate video tour selling a home to an out-of-state buyer who didn’t see it in person until at least the final walk-through.
We can thank Zillow for getting us more comfortable with shooting a two-minute silent walkthrough video, but all agents need to become comfortable with doing a video tour that functions like an actual showing. Who would show a home in two minutes — and without saying a word? Not me!
Some agents are simply shy about being on camera or speaking into a recording. Well, you don’t need to be in front of the camera, so let go of that excuse. And if you simply think of the camera as a buyer that you’re showing the home to, you know exactly what to say as you go through the home. Point out the flooring, the counters, the view out the window. It will come easily.
Lastly, don’t use your smartphone. Buy an HD video camera such as the Osmo Pocket (shown here), which we use. It has a gimble so that your video does not have the shakiness of a handheld camera. It costs about $350 at Best Buy, where we purchased it.
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