Whether you’re a buyer/renter searching for a home or an agent helping to do so, I’m sure you know how important truly experiencing a place is before purchasing. Checklists are always created with key items needing to be hit: the backyard needs to be big enough, the kitchen bright enough, the rooms spacious enough; everything needs to be just right. But when it really comes down to it, those checklists are what make it so hard to truly find the one.
Home buyers today are touring an average of more than 15 properties in person and, most of the time, visiting 10 or more homes before truly even considering a few of them. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if you could narrow the list from 20 potential properties to 10 or from 10 to 5 without having to go through the process of loading up the kids, or finding a sitter, or taking off work to see all of the properties? We all know that feeling of disappointment you get when a home looks amazing in the pictures, but horrible in real life. Not only is it a letdown because you thought the property could the one, but it’s a letdown because you just wasted an entire trip to go see it simply because the photos weren’t sufficient.
So what can you do to alleviate the pain of having to go visit 20 properties in person, then visit your top five again to further narrow down your choices, then go visit those last two homes to truly make a final decision?
Turn to video.
According to the 2012 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, new home buyers place a very large emphasis on the value of virtual tours and videos showcasing properties and communities. Check out these numbers showcasing how powerful video is during the home search process: 70% of home buyers use video to tour the inside of a home, 86% use video to find out more about a specific community, 38% use video to understand specific features, and 44% use video to compare features across properties.
With 90% of buyers and renters starting their property search online, those videos and virtual tours should be much more of a standard practice for agents listing properties. With buyers and renters now realizing the power of video and demanding better ways of experiencing a property without traveling there in person, we’re starting to see a bigger focus on video, but the market still has a long way to go.
This focus on video in the marketplace makes us at Realync very happy because we too are home buyers and renters. We understand the power of video and have personally benefitted from it during our searches. We also aren’t satisfied with the status quo though and want to challenge you to think beyond pre-recorded videos and virtual tour software. What’s the logical next step and progression for the market? Drones? 3D environments? Maybe live video?
Interested in hearing about other powerful ways the real estate industry is changing? Keep checking back to Realync‘s Keepin’ It Real blog to hear more innovations, reports, studies, and personal insights.
Until next time… keep it real!
