The app offers templates, shooting advice, music options and easy sharing tools. There’s also a brokerage account level.
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This article was last updated on July 8, 2022.
Vuse is a mobile app for making videos to promote listings, make home tours and showcase your brand.
Platforms: iOS; browser
Ideal for: All agents, teams and brokerages
Top selling points
- Quick create shortcut button
- “My Top Three” local community templates
- Shot suggestion during capture process
- Direct communications tool
- Templates for each listing stage
- Built-in stock video clips
Top concern
When you enter captions for a shot or still photo in project production, you do so blindly. It would be nice to have the image accompany the text-input fields for each shot. I’d like to see final assembly and processing move faster, which is likely an issue with the cloud server used by the app.
Vuse is a mobile application for real estate agents to create and promote video content for business. It offers a range of templates arranged by categories, which are Personal Promotion, Buyer Preview, Property Spotlight and Direct Communications. Users can assemble video projects from their existing device library or create new material using Vuse’s handy in-screen tips and creation advice. This app has been in development for quite some time and is now truly at a point deserving adoption.
What I like most about this real estate video marketing app is that you’ll never run into a complicated editing bay with trimming tools, audio sliders or multiple layers of soundtracks. It doesn’t make you try to be a video editor, only a creator.
Video can be uploaded from the native device library or captured in-app upon creating a new project. You can access your own photos, tap into the included stock video archive or connect to Dropbox to grab assets you have there. For example, maybe a professional photography partner deposits their art there or Google Drive. Anyway, you can easily connect to online storage receptacles as needed.
The property spotlight template is broken down into Coming Soon, Just Listed, Just Sold and Create Your Own. There’s a nice bit of inspiration at the front-end of each category in the form of an example video for each. They help.
When you choose to capture new images, Vuse asks for camera access and opens its creation interface, displaying a shot-progress bar and a list of narrative help, such as: “The exterior: For your first impression, take a few extra moments to add drama to your reveal.” You can play, again, an example, skip that shot, or start shooting. It doesn’t have to be a video clip each time, as Vuse nicely interjects still photos, too.
Vuse was very sharply designed to take away the creative hesitation that can hamper production. (If given too many options, inexperienced agents sometimes find themselves confused about how to get started — and most are anxious enough about video as it is.)
Vuse lets you choose the layout, style, border and font colors, music and text. There is a voice-over option as well.
Vuse also offers a series of tips as you record. It recommends ways to build anticipation, suggests where to start shooting and ensures your lighting is good. Nice reminders.
Personal Promotion videos are a cool way to push community content, and it’s made easy with templates called “Local Gems” and “Top 3,” a way to create a list of stuff you like about a neighborhood, such as parks, cool architecture examples or kitschy retail shops.
Vuse’s Direct Communication is a tool by which agents can record themselves speaking directly to a client. It’s essentially what BombBomb does, minus the email marketing component. And that’s fine, this isn’t that kind of software. It doesn’t need to be.
The Shortcut feature lets users jump directly into the creation experience, something that will benefit power users and those who have become comfortable with the app.
Finished products can be shared to social media, added to landing pages or included in mail campaigns.
Users have access to tutorials, and you have the ability to build a video profile, which is used for video cards at the front or end of a project. You can toggle them off, by preference.
Perhaps the biggest change I noticed from the early beta version is the administrative back-end that’s centered on template creation and usage permissions. Marketing managers and team leads can build out branded options and determine who can access and edit each video. Colors, fonts, styles and stock footage are readily available for users to be as creative as they can.
You can also setup push notifications to alert users to video views and other statistics.
Now that Vuse has its features and functionality firmly in place, there’s room to begin working on the overall user interface. It could benefit from an updated look and feel, something consumer-inspired. Not at all a deal breaker at all, as it’s the end result that matters most.
Vuse is all about making video as common to a listing as its written description. And best of all, you can’t put unnecessary exclamation points in video.
Or, if you can … please don’t.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
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