Vidlisting Blog: Web Real Estate Video

Participation In The SIMA 2008 Show:

- The show itself had noticeably less participation than last year.  This was due in part to the global decline in real estate but also the cold, rainy April weather in Madrid likely played a role as well.  The last few days had much more normal foot traffic compared to last year than the first few days of SIMA 2008.

- SIMA is the perfect type of show for the Vidlisting trade show representation services. This year, we had a dedicated representation for the American-owned KoKo Resort located in Bocas del Toro, Panama.  Vidlisting (branded as our spanish language real estate video website) provided a complete real estate video package for the stand’s plasma as well as for 10,000 dedicated Koko Resort DVDs that we handed out at the show.  All Vidlisting materials were available in Spanish, English, and Portuguese and we manned the stand with people fluent in each language.

- The real estate video DVDs generated far more interest at the show than the printed material. I lost count of the people that said, “oh wow, a DVD” after initially declining to accept what they thought was just another printed brochure.

- The REALTOR Association of Greater Miami and the Beaches (RAMB) constructed a beautiful video interview area where we filmed english language video interviews for them under a prearranged agreement. We also filmed a number of video interviews on our own in English, Spanish, and Portuguese that we’ll edit and post as soon as possible.

Unfiltered Observations On Our Online Efforts:

- The special vidlisting home page idea worked fairly well. During the dates of the SIMA 2008, we used a special SIMA oriented home page on our english, spanish, and portuguese real estate video sites.  We got some great feedback and even opened some business opportunities as a result.  It took a few days to get three article filters correctly adjusted as we actually had nine filters (three for each language). Next time, we’ll have this right on day one.

- Internet connectivity was surprisingly a challenge given that the show was in Europe. Internet connectivity was being offered for the entire show at 1000 euros (more than US$1500 in total or US$500 per day) which was too rich for our startup blood. We settle for 2 hours of connectivity from the stand per day for about US$50.  This option limited the amount of online and supporting activity that we were able to do directly from the stand.

- We’ll followup the show with a post-SIMA 2008 newsletter to our subscriber base.

The REALTOR Association of Greater Miami and the Beaches (RAMB) has engaged the Vidlisting video team to film a series of video interviews while at the SIMA conference in Madrid, Spain.  While we wont be able to edit and post all of the interviews on a daily basis, we are converting the first batch that were edited yesterday. They will be posted online later today. Links will be posted as they become available.

John Truccillo, Former NAR Chief Economist

I’ll also cover the fabulous interview facilities that RAMB has constructed at the SIMA show as part of their stand showing off Miami in a separate post.

We’ll have a special home page this week on each of our real estate video sites in celebration of SIMA 2008.  SIMA is billed as the world’s largest real estate fair and is held each year in Madrid, Spain. This year’s dates are 8-12 April 2008.  Our special homepage will be up during those dates and will migrate to http://vidlisting.com/sima2008/indexsima.asp thereafter. 

The page auto-updates blog posts, video podcasts, and photos from Flickr that are tagged “SIMA2008″. If you are attending the show, you can also upload your SIMA 2008 themed videos directly to the page.

This page also represents the first commercial usage of our contextual video functionality to find, aggregate, and organize different types of video and multimedia content from a given event. We’ve even used our upcoming developer API to put the page together so that everything is contextually correct. It still needs a lot of work but we are at the point where we are demonstrating it publically with live commercial examples. This will give us a chance to make improvements to the programming interfaces this week.  

You’ll see much more of this in the coming months as version two of the ForSaleByLocals multimedia platform comes online.

More later….