A leasing agent pulls out their phone to film a video tour for a prospective resident only to be hit with a message that their phone is out of storage. Another agent is about to send the perfect community overview video to an anxious prospect…but the file is too big to send. Another property manager is trying to hunt down a video her team recorded several months back to send to a prospective resident only to realize the video was on a former leasing agent’s phone and they have since deleted it. 

None of those situations are convenient or ideal, but, unfortunately, they are all too real. And the only real way to avoid all of them in one fell swoop? Store your videos on the cloud. “The cloud” used to be a mysterious place that only tech companies spoke about and nobody truly understood. Storing stuff in the cloud is now standard practice and we depend on it in more ways than we probably realize for our daily lives..i.e. almost everything on our smartphones! When it comes to multifamily communities, saving videos to the cloud is the only way to go. Here are just a few of the reasons why:

1) Sending Videos Becomes so Easy 

When a prospective resident wants to view a property and you have a video tour that could instantly fill that need, attaching and sending via email or simply texting it to them seems like the logical thing to do. That can be much trickier than it sounds though. To send a video file typically means sending something that is 500mb to 1gb, if not more. That could be reasonable via email, if there weren’t company firewalls preventing certain file types being sent over a certain size or computers that won’t play back specific video types (.avi, .mp4, .mov, .wmv, .flv…etc.). And good luck texting a video if it’s anything over 3 minutes. And sending that video from iOS to Android? That’s a whole other story.

If that video that you’re looking to send to your prospective resident were stored on the cloud though, literally all of the above constraints disappear. Instantly. You’re no longer stuck with a large file or specific file type that won’t send to or won’t play on their device. Instead, you’re sending a link to the video that will then open in their browser and instantly start playing. There is one big caveat when it comes to the file types though. If you simply upload your video to Dropbox or Google Drive, then send the Dropbox link to your prospect, that variable of their device playing back that file type still exists. However, there are platforms and service (like Realync) that will transcode your videos created on the platform into every playback type, ensuring that it will playback no matter what device or browser they are viewing it in. What’s the use of creating videos if you ultimately can’t share them or your prospective resident has a bad experience trying to view them? 

2) Post & Share Videos Simply & Easily

Today’s real estate audience is a digital audience, especially when it comes to videos. One-third of daily online activity is spent watching video and, in the US alone, 85 percent of the internet audience watches videos online in some way, shape, or form. If you have a video that is saved on your phone or computer, you are limited to using that device to share and post that video. Or if you want/need to use another device, you need to revert back to issue #1 above in terms of getting that video sent over to the other device you need it on for social sharing purposes. 

When a video is stored on a cloud platform, leasing agents and multifamily marketing professionals can post, tweet, share, and embed their videos with the touch of a button. And if a leasing agent is interested in the two biggest demographics to ever hit multifamily industry – the Millennial and Generation Z markets – the ability to digitally share video is more important than ever before. 32 percent of Gen Z watch video online for at least one hour every single day and the larger majority watch videos online for at least two hours a day. 21 percent of Millennials and Gen Z will watch videos for more than 3 hours every single day. Reaching them means video. And the easier and simpler sharing those videos is, the more effective they can be. If you have videos, why not make as easy as possible to put them to use? 

3) Share Access to Videos Internally

There’s a common theme here…sharing large video files is hard. And it doesn’t change at all when it comes to sharing amongst your own team. This point literally builds on both of the above two issues if videos are not being stored on the cloud. If agent A has a video on their phone and agent B wants to share it on Instagram, agent B now has to either borrow agent A’s phone in order to do that or agent A has to find a way to send that video to agent B’s device. And if agent A leaves, then agent B is simply out of luck.

Storing videos on the cloud equals instant access and collaboration for not just onsite teams, but corporate stakeholders as well. A big part of the beauty of video is that they can be used by a variety of team members for an even wider variety of purposes. As such, being able to share access to videos amongst the entire team at communities and beyond is extremely important. Imagine losing a prospective resident to the competition because you didn’t have access to the proper video to send them simply because it was on another agent’s phone who couldn’t be reached. Keep that from happening by having a robust video repository on a cloud platform that anyone on the team can access. A lot of time and effort will likely go into producing your videos, so why not put at least a little thought into how to properly store and preserve them? 

4) Losing a Team Member Won’t Mean Losing a Video

Remember the example above of the team looking for a video they had recorded only to realize it was on a former leasing agent’s phone? That happens. And happens way more frequently than you may think. Again, videos take time to put together and can be invaluable for certain prospective residents or even for resident engagement, lease renewals, move-ins, and more. The use cases are countless, so losing a video means losing quite the valuable asset.

By having videos stored on the cloud, the property and corporate team will literally have ownership of those videos, not individual team members. Corporate stakeholders can manage access to the cloud account, manage access rights to ensure nothing gets moved or deleted, and remove access if people leave the company. So while losing a leasing agent can be tough, it doesn’t have to be as tough as losing them and realizing you just lost half of your videos that the team created using that agent’s phone as well. Nobody likes losing anything, so why not take one little step that will ensure you don’t have to lose your videos too?

5) Tracking and Analytics

This is a big one. If a leasing agent sends a non-cloud based video to a prospective resident, that is really where the interaction ends. That leasing agent will have no idea whether that prospect actually viewed the video or interacted with it in any way. In today’s day and age, that is leaving a feast of invaluable information on the table and something that leasing agents cannot afford not to have. 

Perhaps one of the most important ways storing videos on the right cloud platform can benefit a leasing team is through the tracking and analytics it can provide. Simply knowing whether or not that prospective resident actually viewed the video is invaluable, but the data certainly does not stop there. How many times did they view? When did they view it? From what device(s)? Did they share it with anyone else? How many times did that person watch it? How much of the video did they watch? Were there particular parts of the video that they watched the most? A sophisticated, video-focused cloud platform will deliver this level of insight and information to you and your team, and give you an edge that could be the difference between converting a prospective resident to a signed lease or not. Multifamily leasing is a sales game and information is king. Not to mention, knowing that your videos are being viewed and interacted with, means being able to show a return on the investment (both time and money) that you’re making on those video efforts. And who doesn’t love showing a huge ROI on their work? 


Multifamily does not have to be a memory-reliant or photo-reliant industry any longer. Whether hosting a live video tour or creating a pre-recorded video, by saving that content to the cloud, you are making your life, your prospective residents’ lives, and your corporate teams’ lives much, much easier. And richer if you decide on the right platform that empowers you with the proper data, tracking, and analytics on your videos. 

Realync is multifamily’s only video leasing solution and is a purpose-built cloud-based solution checking all of the above boxes for you and your teams. If you want to learn more, please message us at sales@realync.com. 

Until next time…keep it real!