With the economy tightening in the US, agents exploring more and more innovative ways in which they can market their properties. One way is to put a video of a property up on YouTube (its free!) and hope for leads to be generated.

A recent article on www.azstarnet.com, the online version on the Arizona Daily Star, looks at how realtors and homeowners are turning to the web to help sell properties – in particular, YouTube.

A quick search of “homes for sale” on YouTube showed around 19,000 entries – primarily from the US.  While this seems alot, there are 4.4 million homes for sale or rent on realtor.com at the moment – so 19,000 isn’t a large percentage.

It the www.azstarnet.com article, they talk to agent Vicki Holmes from HomesbyHolmes who is selling a house in Colonia Solana, an upmarket neighbourhood of Tuscon. To help drive awareness of this listing, Vicki shot a 90 second commercial for the Colonia Solana home. The ad is below.

The objective is to create more awareness of the listing in the market and hopefully lead to a sale. To date the listing has been viewed 140 times and according to the article, for the agents they intereviewed there has yet to be a direct link between using YouTube and making an actual sale.

Still, if you have already developed video for use with the property then this could be a zero cost reuse of the video. However, as we talked about in a different article, we don’t believe that the use of video on listings is worth the investment.