Real Estate Videos are Boring

Real Estate Videos are Boring

My Journey Towards Creative Storytelling

I guess I’ve always been one of those “creative types.” At least, that is what my mom says. I’m left-handed, so maybe I was pre-destined to follow a certain “creative” path in life.

From a young age, I liked to draw and vividly remember wishing I was better, too. But I doodled nonetheless. When I was in High School, my sister and I took a night school photography class, and that was my official introduction to the world of a 35mm film camera.  We took a couple of field trips to the mountains, actively scouting out things we could take pictures of for assignments we were given, and I really enjoyed the experience. In the 11^th grade, I signed up for a video production class in school. That was when video cameras were the size of a briefcase and took VHS tapes. We edited the film the old-fashioned way by cutting out (literally) what we didn’t need and splicing clips together with scotch tape. I enjoyed that class, especially the creative aspect of communicating the story we were trying to tell so the viewer could easily follow along. But wow was it ever a tremendous amount of work to edit!

I Was the Dad With the Camcorder in my Hand

Eventually, I grew up and had kids of my own and in the early to mid 2000’s, I was the dad with the camcorder in my hand, capturing the memories and making home movies. Editing on Microsoft Movie Maker, which was better than actually cutting film strips with scissors, but not by much.

It wasn’t until 2008, when my son was picked for eight-year-old all-stars in baseball, that my love for photography and videography started to seamlessly blend together and take off. Before his first tournament, I purchased my first DSLR camera, a Nikon D40 and it connected into the mix another one of my loves which is technology. It combined all the aspects of the things I had loved in the past (photography and videography) into one cool little package. I started shooting his baseball games and turning them into videos that were fun to watch.

I Had to Learn How To Film in Front of a Green Screen

Only a few years later, my friend Josh and I decided to create a backpacking gear review channel on YouTube where we would discuss the gear we had that worked and did not work. I wanted to film in front of a green screen and had to learn the nuances of just how to do it. It was trial and error, to say the least. Check out the outtakes at the very end of this video HERE to see the green screen and have a laugh at my expense.

In 2014, Linda and I opened our Real Estate Brokerage, and in the burgeoning age of media and specifically social media, I quickly discovered that my journey in photo, video, and green screen filming had purposely led me to that very moment in life. It was surreal to be honest, and I could very easily see God’s hand directly involved in all of these individual parts of my journey, years and even decades beforehand.

⬆ Linda and I Recording in Front of our Green Screen

Linda and I quickly became adept at utilizing these skills and started filming weekly videos in front of our office green screen with tremendous feedback. This was before anyone else was doing stuff like this. HERE is a video of us from September 2017. I’ve always loved the onscreen chemistry Linda and I have.  

In 2015, we were one of the first real estate teams in our area to use aerial drone footage in our listing videos. At the time, it did have a high cool factor but ultimately it was short-lived. In the coming years when I started seeing more and more companies utilize drones, we knew it was time to reinvent our process. Don’t get me wrong, we still have drone footage in our videos these days but very little and it’s typically just a glimpse of the surrounding area and no longer a centric part of the video as it used to be. Nowadays in 2024, so many agents are doing the same thing we were doing all the way back in 2015, a video that starts out with drone footage that blends into interior shots with some melodic background music. It’s become white noise, and I believe the public now just tunes it out; I know I sure do when I come across the majority of real estate content on social media.

Real Estate Videos are Boring!

Somewhere along the way, I came to the realization that real estate videos were just boring and we needed to figure out how to not be boring. Linda and I sat down and discussed a format that would be interesting and make people want to watch. A format that told the story of how a person could envision their life in that particular home. We came to the conclusion that we needed to be in the videos moving forward and we also needed an interesting opening lifestyle sequence that drew people in. With several years of social media filming, we had inadvertently been training for this next step. We had become pretty comfortable on camera by that point.

In the end, I think we’ve done a pretty good job, but I’d love your feedback. I am a bit like the wizard behind the curtain, though, always pulling levers and turning knobs. This video below had over 4,700 views and over 15,000 impressions on YouTube, with over 800 clicks back to the featured property page on our website. It resulted in 6 offers, all at or over full price.

⬆ What Do You Think?

What an awesome journey it’s been too, to do something that I love. I’m extremely thankful for the passions as well as experiences that God has put in front of me throughout my life to train me specifically for the career we now have in real estate. I sometimes find myself wondering just what the next reinvention will be for us. But, just as that first DSLR camera was a game changer for me that pulled everything together, maybe the next thing for Linda and I hasn’t yet been invented. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.