Clinch, maker of automatic marketing videos, joined the growing field of firms offering portals, brokerages and agents the ability to feature dynamic videos on listings in their search platforms by signing up Chicago-based brokerage Dream Town Realty in February this year.
Like a similar product from real estate video tech vendor VScreen, Clinch takes multiple listing service data like photos, prices and property descriptions, melds it with info from other real estate-related data sources like Google Maps, and creates a video complete with broker and agent branding and voice-over as soon as a user presses play on a listing video.
Dream Town Realty is Clinch’s first real estate client, bringing on-demand automatic videos to nearly all of Chicago’s for-sale homes through the brokerage’s real estate search platform. Like many brokerages, Dream Town Realty’s search platform features the pooled listings that brokers in a market make available to each other for consumer display.
Screenshot of an automatic listing video now featured on a listing on Dream Town Realty’s search platform.
That means Dream Town Realty now offers on-demand listing videos for all of the approximate 64,000 active listings in its search database, Dream Town Realty founder and President Yuval Degani told Inman.
Yuval Degani
Dream Town Realty is not the first brokerage in Chicago to bring on-demand videos to real estate search.
Chicago homebuyers already had access to automated listing videos through Redfin. In 2013, the Seattle-based brokerage partnered with SundaySky — the tech vendor behind VScreen’s offerings — to create on-demand videos for all listings on its search platform. (Compare the automatic, on-demand videos from Dream Town Realty and Redfin at one Chicago listing.)
Last year, dynamic listing videos had a coming-out party of sorts. Tech firms like VScreen, RealBiz Media Group and Onvedeo announced big deals and new products.
For example, the fourth most popular real estate portal in the U.S., Homes.com, partnered with VScreen last year to add dynamic, automated listing videos to the listings of its Homes.com Pro and Premier customers, representing approximately 140,000 listings.
Clinch uses HTML5 technology to create the videos, which allows users to play them within the Web or mobile browser they happen to be using, precluding the need to open a separate page or deal with a pop-up screen, said Oz Etzioni, Clinch’s CEO and co-founder. Other video vendors, including VScreen and Onvedeo, also allow users to play videos within their browsers.
Dream Town Realty made the decision to bake listing videos into its search platform to enhance the search experience for visitors to its site, Degani said.