Question of the Day: Your thoughts about Matterport being acquired?19746

Originally Posted by @Dataventurer


He mentioned his opinion that 360 tours were waning in popularity and that video use was surging. I wrote a long comment to the video that disappeared this morning when I visited the page. So, not to waste my commenting efforts, I post it here to accompany Nathan's video.

How are you seeing video orders in your area???

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Thank you, Nathan, for staying on top of the pertinent developments in the greater real estate media scene. It's thought-provoking to hear your observations.

I want to respond to your claim that video is gaining traction for promoting residential properties. I'm not seeing that happening. I am persuaded that the top real estate search sites are where prospective buyers are going to find homes. Based upon the kind of traffic data that you presented in your video post, home buyers intentionally visit Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin, etc. to search for homes. That's the arena that I focus on for data.

I have a California realtor's license with a major brokerage and also offer full digital media services and consulting to my fellow agents. From my vantage point rubbing shoulders with realtors in my area (south Bay Area in northern California), a very small percentage of them are actively (and effectively) promoting their listings on social media. Even my most tech savvy realtor clients have not discussed, asked for, or indicated an interest in digital media formatted for social media platforms.

Maybe there is a portion of realtors who are using social media (and therefore video) to promote their listings. I'm just not seeing it in my area.

I just did a search on all the homes, condo, and townhomes listed for sale in the MLS area around me. There are 135 properties. 81 of those listings show ONLY photos to showcase their listings. That means only 41% of the properties use additional media. I just looked through all the medial links for the 54 listings that have additional media and found 22 that used a video. That represents just over 16% of the active listing out of 135 that chose to use video.

On the one hand, you could say, rightfully so, that there is a huge opportunity to sell videos here. So why don't agents utilize video in their marketing efforts?

I think there are two main reasons. First, is the cost of a video that must be paid for BEFORE agents make any commission (and there's a lot to be said about that!). The second reason is that the three leading search sites that I mentioned don't make much of an effort to feature and present videos. Especially Zillow! The link to off-site media is buried in the Zillow Facts and Features section. Realtor.com will only post an icon in the hero photo for videos hosted on YouTube and Vimeo. Same with Redfin. So home shoppers need to be really motivated to look for videos to find them.

Bottom line for me is that I have statistical data collected from my own listings watching the viewing stats for Zillow page views, Zillow Home Tours, property pages, and videos. The videos are showing lower (far lower) views than the 360 tours and a one-digit fraction of the views compared to Zillow page views.

I would expect other real estate photographers in other markets see different trends. But where I'm at, video isn't being used much by agents to showcase their listings.