Does it make financial sense to spend extra money on a 3D tour or video of a property? In most cases, the answer is a resounding and overwhelming “YES”. Statistics from the National Association of Realtors are clear:

• 97% of all home buyers will search online to find a home
• Video and 3D tours help sell properties four times better than using photos alone.
• Videos drive 157% more traffic to your website
• 51% of home buyers use YouTube as their number one destination to search for a home
• 73% of homeowners are more likely to list with a realtor offering video marketing
• According to the Wall Street Journal, YouTube is exploding as the premier platform for showcasing real estate home tours.

Because competition for consumer attention is fierce, the more engaging your visuals are, the more you will capture attention of your prospective clients. Research shows it takes on average, seven impressions before a person will respond to mass marketing. To that end, when you make a listing video, you are not merely showing the building, you are promoting your brand and using video will help your audience remember you and your listings even if they are not currently in the market. Videos are also becoming the norm in social media and for this reason alone, any cross-platform marketing effort will need to include immersive media such as video and 3D tours.  More home buyers are expecting 3D media it in their home searches, and for this reason alone every realtor should be using it.  Video and 3D tours connect more purchasers to your listing and also expands your web presence across multiple channels, so using this type of media is essential in gaining more conversions in your digital marketing. Selling Faster Inviting Competition Exposure = awareness = competition. It’s simple; the more people know about an opportunity, the more interested parties will compete to seize it. In short, you can’t start a bidding war in a vacuum, and in a healthy market, the more awareness you can generate, the better your chances are of facilitating competitive bids. ROI – Are Marketing Packages Worth it? In today’s market, commissions on a home sale are measured in tens of thousands of dollars and the cost of adding video to your marketing usually constitutes 1%-5% of a total marketing budget for a property. The difference between posting images on the MLS and a few other sites and adding video is enormous, and there is little rationale for not implementing it. Social media ads have a far greater ROI than almost any other type of marketing and paying for a social media campaign without a video is almost a waste of an ad budget. You can see how many people saw your advertising, how they interacted, and how the campaign performed based on your click-through rate, and video consistently outperforms static images on social media. A click-through rate is measured by dividing the number of clicks by the total impressions and then multiplying by 100. A typical click-through rate on Facebook is between two to five percent. So anything above 5% is good. You can track the success of your ads in detail and fine tune your strategy over time. Some companies such as MLSVRmedia.com not only specialize in developing marketing content for real estate listings, but also deploy the media across multiple platforms. Over the course of weeks, a campaign can reach your target audience multiple times with one package. This is done in the form of a “Coming Soon” video, a “Just Listed” video and a “Just Sold” video in addition to the virtual tours that will appear on the listing website which is also included. A single social media campaign can reach thousands of qualified home shoppers, resulting in faster property sales. On request, additional reach can be achieved by only adding an extra $50 to the ad spend. By opting to purchase an entire marketing package for a few hundred dollars above a photos-only spend, a realtor greatly expands the number of impressions they make in their target audience which is not only good for selling the property, but also good for brand awareness. In conclusion, the cost of creating marketing videos, 3D tours, a listing website and a targeted social media campaign is insignificant compared to the return when the property sells, and using these assets will only help the property sell faster and potentially for more as more exposure means more competitive bidding. The 90-10 rule states that ten percent of real estate agents account for ninety percent of the total sales volume. It appears to be no coincidence that recent statistics show that only ten percent of realtors make use of immersive media when marketing their listings. Is it a coincidence, then, that the remaining ninety percent are not taking advantage of the most persuasive marketing technology available? Probably not. by James Steidl