Video Photography for Real Estate

There was an article today in the Seattle Times today about how new models of compact digital cameras are able to shoot fairly long video clips. This article got me thinking about the fact that we added a video camcorder to our real estate photography tools this last year. We purchased a Sony camcorder that writes to mini-DVD disks.

To me the key technology is the ability to create a DVD disk that one can quickly and easily give to a client. These cameras in the Seattle Times article can create video but to give it to a client in any form they can use is a more difficult process that can take hours and special software. We used the new camcorder on our first transaction this year where our buyers could not make it to a critical stucco inspection because of their busy schedules. I video taped the stucco inspector describing the problems with the stucco and gave the mini-DVD to the buyers right out of the camera later that day. Later I made copies for the listing agent and sellers and our transaction records with a DVD copy program.

We’ve also used the camcorder to record key features of a series of homes while showing homes and then gave the DVD to the buyer at the end of the showings. This was less effective because of all things I didn’t have a wide-angle converter for the camcorder so it was hard to shoot interiors. We are fixing that problem.

I believe that the ability to shoot video can be very useful for real estate agents but the only video cameras I can recommend to real estate agents are the ones that write the video straight to a mini-DVD.