Sellers find action in home videos
Gina Sanginario, a sales director at Adams Farm, is recorded in a condoDomain.com video in a unit at the Shrewsbury development.
(Globe Staff / Suzanne Kreiter)The video Mary Canales created to sell her home was filmed in the cinema verité style, with a shaky hand-held camera wandering from room to room, occasionally bumping into an wall, dark bathroom or poorly lit corner.
She also unwittingly borrowed from director Alfred Hitchcock, whose fleeting cameos are a trademark of his most famous films. Canales's own cameo appears as she turns her lens toward her front door. There she is - red blouse reflecting back at the camera from glass double doors.
"I wanted to make it better - I just haven't had time," she said apologetically of the video she shot to sell her $514,900 home in Windham, N.H.
Coldwell Banker labels videos of houses for sale on its website "Home Movies." They are anything but that: The camera pans smoothly from a full view of the front of the property and a street scene to indoors, from one sun-filled room to another, before moving out to the backyard.
From amateur auteur to professional videographer, home sellers are increasingly turning to movies and streaming video over the Internet to market their properties. It is the latest form of visual advertising that started with posted photos and progressed to slide shows to 360-degree pans of properties.
Fans of the technology said a property video - like the YouTube clip du jour - can hold Internet surfers' attention on one property much longer than a photo gallery.
CondoDomain.com, which markets units in 32 US cities, including Boston, began offering video services to property developers and agents last year. Founder Anthony Longo said an analysis of viewer habits found that listings with an accompanying video were watched by five times more visitors than those that didn't have video; and visitors watched the videos for at least 20 minutes, compared with three- to six-minute visits to listings with just static images.
"A virtual tour just isn't doing it anymore," he said.
Coldwell Banker has produced two- to three-minute videos for homesellers since 2003, and the service is covered by the agency's existing fee - about 5.5 percent of the sale price.
The videos are available for viewing on the individual listing pages of the brokerage's website, NewEnglandMoves.com. An icon of the chalk clappers used to track scenes on movie lots indicates when a listing includes video.
Coldwell brokers who want a video for a client's house pay the company a flat $50 fee to produce it - about 10 percent of the company's actual cost. Sellers may also order extra copies of their videos to leave at open houses - $20 for the first one and $2 for additional copies.
The videos are available not just to sellers of $1 million properties, but to those of moderately priced homes, such as a $439,000 single-family for sale in Arlington or another $229,900 condominium listing in Dorchester.
Videos are available "regardless of price," said Roni Boyles, company spokeswoman. There are currently 5,000 video listings on the site, and each is viewed, on average, about 50 times per month, Boyles said.
Mary Canales was on her own when making the video for her New Hampshire house. But the automobile broker has successfully used videos many times in the past to sell cars.
Video "sells the car better than still images," she said. So she borrowed her son's new video camera and started filmed the house. Simple as that. She used
It cost her $99 to post it on ForSaleByOwner.com, in addition to the $199 fee to list the property on the website. The site has more than 50 listings that include videos, but that's out of more than 40,000 property listings a year.
While Canales's video has attracted just one interested buyer to visit, he told her after seeing the actual house in person that "the house was so much better than the video."
At condoDomain.com, the videos typically include virtual - or static - images of exteriors and interiors, rather than moving pictures, but feature street scenes filmed around the development and are populated by the brokers and real estate developers touting their projects.
"There are so many great personalities in real estate, let's grab some of these personalities and put them on," Longo said of his idea behind the videos. The website has produced videos for projects such as 111 Central Park North in Manhattan and the Nouvelle condominiums at Natick Mall in Massachusetts to 903 Providence Place in Rhode Island.
Cable giant
Viewers can see properties for sale throughout New England by clicking 888 on their remote and then selecting the "real estate" category.
The cable firm has sold air time to developers and other large advertisers who run their own videos of projects for sale.
But Jean Monahan, an agent with Prudential Verani Realty Inc. in Londonderry, N.H., said she sold the first house she advertised on Comcast less than two weeks after the spot appeared.
Her clients, she said, "were tickled pink."
Kimberly Blanton can be reached at blanton@globe.com.
