DVDs for Real Estate Agents?
 

I would like to approach a friend of mine who is a real estate agent about paying me to create DVDs (home showing purposes) for some of her clients. Do any of you have experience with this? How do you handle payment and who pays - homeowners up front, individual agents after or before sale, the agency after or before? Any advise would be welcome.

I am not sure how you would go about it, but one thing I have found is that not everyone has a DVD player. I would consider also making a VHS tape too.

Unless the real estate agent is using it on a laptop to show to clients...

Dan, I considered this as a business venture, and approached a real estate friend of mine about it. From my discussions, I ascertained that any sort of marketing collateral that is created is normally the responsibility of the listing agent. Those are things like flyers, pics for websites, newspaper ads, etc. Think of it this way -- if you were selling your $500,000 house, and were going to pay perhaps as much as $30,000 in commissions, you certainly wouldn't want to pay for any marketing expense.

While it sounds like a good idea (after all, I thought of it too! :D), Real Estate agents are always looking for ways to save $$, and so the thought of paying money for something like this is not too appealing. And as you have probably figured out, in order to do the job right, it will take several hours of your time (go to the house, shoot the outside, shoot the inside, probably with the use of a steadicam, drop the tape into your NLE system, throw a title on the front and a price on the back, and burn a DVD (or VHS tape as Lisa mentioned). All that is probably 4 hours of your time, maybe more. As a homeowner, I'd probably want music too (not copyrighted music!), or maybe a voiceover describing the home (who does that? you? the homeowner? the agent?), and I think I'd want titles as we went along... "Breakfast nook", "Study", etc. I think the scope of effort could quickly get out of hand, increasing the cost.

But even at a modest $50 / hour x 4 hours, you're looking at $200 per house, and that was too much for my real estate friend to swallow. On the other hand, if you approached high end agents, and offered to do this for all of their high-end homes (creating one DVD featuring, say, 10-15 homes), then you might have something. The problem with that approach is that the houses eventually sell, and so the DVD is dated, which says that you probably need to do this on perhaps a monthly basis. You could do it for a fixed monthly fee "up to xx houses" sort of approach. Any way I could think to slice it, it ended up too expensive for the agent.

As I re-read my post, I think I'm coming across as sort of a wet blanket -- not my intention, I assure you. I wish you luck in your venture -- I couldn't get the math to work on it here in Austin.

Reply to James
 

Thanks James,

I think you're right on the "money".
Good idea though about doing it once/month for a few high end homes only. I live in a suburb of Washington DC and may possibly be dealing with agents who sell homes worth $5K to several million. Given the commission on a couple of those, maybe a 1K video once/mo. could fly.

Dan