If you haven’t heard, Apple just released their latest iPhone, the iPhone 3G S. With the iPhone becoming more and more popular with real estate agents, I thought I’d explore the implications of it’s most powerful feature: the ability to shoot video.
Video For Dummies
The biggest upgrade to the new iPhone is the ability to record video. Video also happens to be one of the fastest growing areas in real estate, and it doesn’t take a genius to imagine the opportunitys. What really make this feature powerful, though, is the ability to quickly edit videos right from your phone.
If you’re like many agents, you simply don’t have time to go home, upload a video, fire up the editing software, and clean up a video for all your clients. My guess is that beyond the technology, the time factor is the single biggest obstacle to adding video to your real estate arsenal.
That’s the exact area the new iPhone 3G S has conquered, by giving you the ability to easily edit video right from the phone. Suddenly, something that used to take up to an hour or longer can be done in a matter of minutes, from anywhere. Now, instead of just using video for your listings, you can use it for everything.
Imagine:
Zipping around on tour, taking 60 second videos of your favorite properties. Then, editing them and the car and sending them to right to your clients in a matter of minutes!
Walking through your favorite neighborhood, and quickly making a mini- neighborhood video for your blog or hyper-local real estate website!
On your next listing presentation, recording a video of your potential clients home to show, instead of telling, how you use the latest technology to market and sell their home.
With any new technology, the hardest part is making it simple and easy enough for the average person to actually use. For real estate agents, the new iPhone 3G S may be just the thing that takes us from “I should think about using video someday” to “Let me get my iPhone out and shoot a video of this right now”.
And now the public will have to endure a wrath of BAD video made by real estate agents.
Great.
Realtors can’t even take acceptable PHOTOS. This should be realtors out of business if they’re using a cell phone to market a property.
God help us all.
Just because you CAN do something does NOT mean you should. This is a perfect example.
Paul,
Sounds like you’ve had bad experience with a real estate agent in the past… I’m sorry to hear that. I agree that there is a time and a place to be using cell photos or video, just as there is a time and a place for using a professional photographer. The main point of my post was that it opens up even more possibilities for agents to communicate with clients, especially when it wouldn’t make sense to hire a professional photographer (when an agent sees a good property while on tour, for example). I can tell you that if I told clients about a house I saw, then offered to email them a video of it, they’d prefer even a rough video to no video at all, and the alternative of hiring a photographer to go visit that specific property just doesn’t really make sense to me in that situation.