realestate.com Listings on youtube.com

US brokerage and property portal realestate.com has loaded virtual tours of all of its agents’ listings to a dedicated YouTube channel.

realestate.com is certainly not the only brokerage or portal that is using YouTube, but it does seem to be the only one that is systematically releasing all of its listings on YouTube.

The company told Inman News it will add virtual tours to YouTube for any broker or agent with featured listings on realestate.com.

“We’ll be happy to put up anyone else’s listings (on the YouTube channel) if they want,” Greg Hanson, senior vice president and general manager of realestate.com said. “We’re different that way — as a portal and a broker, we’ll feature other brokers’ listings.”

Users can search for virtual tours of home listings by MLS number, address, city or ZIP code and are encouraged to call a toll-free number advertised on the videos themselves and the channel, which connects them to a local real estate agent. Users can also click through from YouTube to the complete listing information details on realestate.com.

realestate.com’s “virtual tour” videos have been created by CirclePix. While the videos are little more than slideshows of the listing photos and details accompanied by a soundtrack, the potential for listings to really utilise YouTube as a way to stand out, capture a new market and promote listings certainly exists.

Online videos in general are growing in popularity, numbers and types of users using them, the length and number of videos Internet users watch, and any other category it’s possible to measure. Data from the January 2009 comScore Video Metrix service, which was released earlier this month, shows that US Internet users viewed 14.8 billion online videos during that month – an increase of 4 percent on December 2008. And YouTube surpassed 100 million viewers for the first time.

When propertyportalwatch.com checked there were 1223 videos on realestate.com’s YouTube.com channel, and the channel had received 1920 views.

Other portals honing in on YouTube’s possibilities include UK based findaproperty.com which has loaded neighbourhood overviews and hosted its TV advertisements on YouTube. nestoria.co.uk also has a YouTube channel with some how to and promotional videos. US based trulia.com has a very active YouTube channel and uses it to run interviews, opinion pieces and demonstration videos.

A quick check on names reveals that many inactive YouTube channels (with no videos listed) are registered under well-known portal names. Whether these are valid YouTube accounts set up by the portals themselves simply to view and comment on other YouTube videos, or are accounts belonging to similarly named users or companies, is unclear.

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