How To Select Your Professional Real Estate Videographer - Part 1
A number of real estate video companies are boasting about the number of videographers that they have in their network. That would be a great advantage if every videographer had the same high level of talent and ability. Lesson #1 should really be that all videographers were not created equal. It would be so much easier if they were. So, rather than simply select the person or company that happens to be in the same zip code as you, we’ll provide some things to think about when selecting a videographer to film a property tour.
I need to be upfront about a few things before we start digging into this topic in depth. Understanding my bias is important as you weigh criteria for hiring your professional.
First, Vidlisting hardly ever works with firms or people that bill themselves exclusively as “real estate video specialists”. There are always exceptions but we’ve found that many billing themselves as such are more focused on the equipment than the visual results. In some cases, we’ve found real estate video specialists that have hung out their shingle simply based on ownership of a higher end video camera.
Lesson #1 - Dont be impressed by equipment. Anyone with a credit card can buy a high end camera. Before you start talking about equipment, ask your prospective videographer what they’ve previously done, how they were trained, and if involved in larger projects such as TV shows what their specific role was (it may have been being an assistant or something less than centrally involved).
So, now that we have a good understanding of the general experience level of your prospective videographer, it’s time to find out what they know about real estate, architecture, and highlighting properties that are for sale. There are great videographers that have never filmed a property and some that have filmed bunches of properties that still cant get the details right.
Our second bias is against something that we call “tripod height” filming. Watch any real estate TV show and you’ll see a wide variety of camera angles for filming inside and outside of a property. The angles are generally key to building interest in an architectural feature. We like to think that professional online real estate video companies provide TV level results.
Lesson #2 - Good videographers do more than just pan their camera - they have a sense of what they want to highlight and why. One techique that we have is to ask the prospective videographer to walk through any property (usually wherever we are located) and quickly tell us what the high points of the property are architecturally and how they would film them. It’s the same process that they be using to frame shots of they were filming so what they talk about is generally what and how they’ll film.
Stay tuned for part 2 of this blog post….
Tags: real estate, selection, techniques
March 23rd, 2008 at 12:44 pm
[…] covered two lessons in Part 1 of this series on how to select your professional real estate videographer. Now, let’s focus on the meat of selecting your real estate videographer. You’ll likely […]