Internet videos provide Realtors fast selling tool

Joan Shaw began visiting YouTube.com in 2006 on a personal lark, dabbling in her free time with submitting videos to the Web site and watching other people’s contributions.

Amid posting personal videos of fun times among friends, Shaw made an observation: The site loaded videos for viewing “faster than anyone.” Thus came Shaw’s “eureka” moment: She could use the site to store video tours of the homes she listed as a Realtor with Majestic Properties in Las Vegas.

“It’s very important, when someone clicks on something, that it comes up fast,” Shaw said. “Otherwise, you might lose people. If a video takes too long to load, a person might click it off.”

So Shaw keeps her video tours at YouTube, and sends potential buyers links to the spots if they request additional information on specific properties. She estimates she’s put videos of at least 10 homes online since she began using YouTube professionally earlier this year.

YouTube officials didn’t comment before press time about whether they’re seeing an increase in the number of real estate agents and homeowners who are uploading video of homes on the market, but a YouTube search for “Las Vegas home for sale” turned up 264 entries Tuesday. A general, national search yielded 15,500 hits. Videos featuring local properties ranged from about 30 seconds to nearly 10 minutes.

John Brassner, a Realtor with Windermere Summerlin, placed video of a $189,900 Las Vegas condominium online in the summer. The Web site helped him reach out-of-town prospects, a key market segment in a town with significant in-migration and large numbers of vacation-home buyers.

Brassner couldn’t credit YouTube with the sale of his listing — a fellow Realtor saw the property in a trade-group database and recommended it to a buyer — but his first experience was positive enough that he’s preparing to list three more homes priced at under $300,000, as well as commercial properties.

More-conventional venues for home marketing are adding video capabilities similar to YouTube’s services.

The National Association of Realtors and its local affiliate, the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors, share a proprietary national and regional Multiple Listing Service the public can view at Realtor.com. The nationwide version has more than 3 million listings. The local version contains about 28,000 properties — every home placed on the Las Vegas market through a Realtor. Agents can upload videos to the site, and they can attach photos and panning, panoramic views of homes to their listings. Each entry includes details such as lot size, roofing type, energy efficiency and the names of the schools a home’s residents are zoned to attend.

Because Realtor.com is available only to members of the national, state and local associations of Realtors, the brokers whose listings appear on the site have subscribed to the trade groups’ code of ethics. That provides a recourse for professional consequences if a sales agent puts inaccurate or discriminatory information online, and it gives an extra layer of protection to the consumer, said David Boyer, chairman of the Multiple Listing Service committee of the Greater Las Vegas Association of Realtors.

To get a house listed at Realtor.com, a homeowner must retain a Realtor to broker the sale of his property.

Boyer said YouTube is a “complementary” marketing tool rather than a competitor to Realtor.com.

“Anything that gets a listing exposed to more eyeballs is a good thing for clients,” said Boyer, who hasn’t used YouTube to showcase his properties.

Executives at the Review-Journal plan to unveil in the first quarter an enhanced Web site with “YouTube-type” functions, said Rebecca Bradner, the newspaper’s director of classified advertising. Users will pay a “minimal charge” to access the service, she said.

“Sellers enjoy that way of communicating with buyers, and we want to make sure we offer everything buyers want,” Bradner said.

The Review-Journal has an edge in that its Web site has more local traffic than national sites such as YouTube or Realtor.com, Bradner added.

“Obviously, the transaction of buying a home or car or finding a job is local,” she said.

But YouTube gives Brassner an asset he said the alternatives can’t deliver: street cred among tech-savvy members of Generation Y, the 20- to 30-year-olds who are wading into the home-buying market for the first time.

“They may think the house is cooler if it was on YouTube,” he said. “Being on YouTube gives a home cachet, and it gives me cachet with those folks.”

Contact reporter Jennifer Robison at jrobison@reviewjournal.com or (702) 380-4512.