September is Marketing and Branding Month at Inman. Tips for better branding and in-depth features on how to take advantage of marketing tools provided by Zillow, Redfin and other platforms are all in the works in addition to insights from experts. You’ll find it all at Inman, as well as our two-day virtual, flagship event, Your Playbook for the Fall Market, in October.
This story was last updated September 22, 2022.
Video content.
You know you need create it. You know it works. You know where to publish it.
So what’s stopping you?
Not a single demonstration I see of software that helps agents create and publish video content finishes without someone saying, “Agents overthink it.”
Gone are the days of using busy, complicated professional-level technologies that require layering sound over visuals, dragging tiny arrows to cut milliseconds off of an opening or having to pay for high-end soundtracks.
The biggest tools in watchable video today are TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube, and just about every minute of video you watch on them is made by an amateur. It’s authentic, cheaply produced and effective.
So, for the umpteenth time: Stop overthinking it. And the following apps and tools can help you do it.
Vuse
Vuse 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.
The app 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.
This app has been in development for quite some time and is now truly at a point deserving adoption.
BigVu
With direct-to-social video posting, deep content analytics and a number of tools to make videos easy to produce and edit, BigVu could have a significant role in any real estate business looking to commit to video.
The interface, editing tools and flexibility offer a range of user levels, a low learning curve, and the expert marketer a few new tricks to add to their outreach mix.
The teleprompter tool is quite slick, enabling clear, simple text input and a number of settings for easy, slow reading as your native phone or desktop camera captures the visual. We know how popular sales scripts are for cold calling and other lead-gen efforts, so it should come as no surprise that according to BigVu’s research, 75 percent of real estate agents prefer writing down a script before recording a video.
Playhouse
This app is modeled after today’s most common social video apps but it’s designed specifically for real estate. Agents can post individual branding content, build profile libraries and, generally, share everything that can help bind consumers to their brand.
All the tools are here and easy to access: a heart icon to like a post; an arrow to share and send; the ability to save a listing; and links that delve into an agent’s, team’s or brokerage’s full Playhouse library.
The app can do some market education, too. The Listing Price Game, which can be toggled on or off as you go, offers up a random listing video and animates the list price, engaging the user to predict if the price is higher or lower.
Yaza
Yaza is a video-based home tour tool.
By tying into your iPhone’s native GPS functionality, each video made in Yaza is authenticated to the listing’s location and time of recording. Every snippet is plotted automatically on the app’s map feature, providing agents and users with an easy way to hop from video tour to video tour.
The software doesn’t assemble every take at a specific listing into a single seamless video, as some virtual and video tour apps do. Users are encouraged to record short room-by-room tours instead of assembling them all into a long-form production, which takes time and delays outreach.
Inspectors and appraisers would like using Yaza, as well, specifically because of the way it relies on a series of individual videos. Inspectors can capture and categorize items by tag, record time-stamped comments and place private links to each in their final report.
iMovie
iMovie can do the advanced stuff if you want it to. But it’s free and already on most agents’ phones. Some features include Magic Movie, the ability to select a few clips or stills have it automatically build you usable block of content. You can add captions, fonts and music as needed. Super simple.
The Storyboard tool has a number of templates around which a user can create a video, and many of them are themed based on popular social media content trends, such as cooking, wellness, DIY and About Me.
Splice
This is a pretty awesome video creation tool by Vimeo (it used to be owned by GoPro) that has some image effects and editing tools you probably wouldn’t expect to find on a free app (such as Vintage and Glitchy), like a simple tap-to-choose transition editor and built-in project size formats, even options for SnapChat.
The music library is huge, categorized by Dramatic, Fitness, Pop, Electronic, Inspiring and a number of others. There are 1,000s of options. The Overlay option lets you select an image to place on top of another, a cool visual element used to communicate more information, as they do in a newscast. You can leverage it to show location on a map or a before interior shot placed on top of the after.
Splice is also really fun to play with, and it’s user experience uses tap length to execute features. Big fan.
Beyond the above mentioned apps, there are also all-inclusive solutions for agents who want supporting content for their tours, such as still photos, multiple tour types, floorplans and even video listing pages.
Real Vision, TruPlace and Real Estate Shows offer marketing value-adds with digital showing tools. OpenHouse Live can be used to live-tour multiple people through existing Matterport tours (as can HomeRover, NodalView and Planitar’s iGUIDE) but with its proprietary capture device and its slick interactive floor plans.
Lastly, know that any of today’s mainstream social media-based live streaming options can be just as easily used to perform a digital showing.
