Why video sells inner-Sydney real estate

By David Servi

Clichés are clichés because they’re often right.

So a picture really is worth a thousand words, especially these days when busy people often don’t have the time to read, absorb and assess the meaning of a thousand words.

Photos sell real estate. Good photos sell real estate extremely well. And the new best thing is video. A video of a walk-through in a property can whet the appetite of potential buyers and give them a taste of what could be theirs.

Video is even better with the addition of some aerial footage taken with a drone, to give a flavour of the property’s surroundings.

Spencer & Servi’s expert and professional in-house cinematographer, Matthew Minnett, can shoot and edit brief but wildly effective videos to highlight the best points in any property, with drone footage to show the property’s surroundings – perhaps its proximity to a park, or a playground, or a vista of pretty, tree-lined streets, or the sweeping view from a window.

Potential buyers have often told us they were initially drawn to actually visit a property in person when they saw the video on our website. Analysis (via such sites as Google Analytics) tells us that our videos pull buyers to our website to learn more about particular properties.

It’s important to ensure that a video actually is a video, rather than a series of still photos edited together and pretending to be a video. This second-best option seems to be the preferred choice of many real estate agents, but it is far less effective than a professionally shot video that moves, and moves traffic, in the real sense of the word.

The giant US technology firm Cisco believes that video will account for 80 per cent of all internet traffic in 2019, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has said he thinks 90 per cent of the social network’s content will be videos by as early as next year. Pundits might blog these days, but many prefer to vlog.

Facebook research has found that people gaze five times longer at video than at static content on Facebook and Instagram.

Younger generations, with increasingly short attention spans, want to see things move, and even those of us who are older would prefer to watch a short film than stare at a series of static images (no matter how carefully disguised as a video with the use of long edited fades and fake pans).

Video of talking heads, though, doesn’t seem to sell real estate. Potential buyers want to see a video of that paved courtyard with a currawong perched on the fence, or the sun filtering through a stained glass window, or the stylish tiles in a bathroom, or the iron filigree on a verandah, or expansive aerial footage of nearby streets.

They want to imagine themselves in that property, owning that property. They’re not so keen on watching some bloke in a suit spouting carefully rehearsed ad content.

We highly recommend using video to all our clients to enhance the prospects of attracting visits and, eventually, a superb price for their property.  And we promise we won’t star in it.