I was going to call this post ‘Do Quality Marketing Materials Really make a difference?’ It is a question worth discussing. In the US marketplace, there is no such thing as VPA (Vendor Paid Advertising). The sales commissions for Agents are higher (around 4 – 4.6%) and from that, they have to finance all their own marketing.

So, in the United States, Agents ‘doing it themselves’ is common place – assisted by new technology which sees kids in prams texting. Now Americans aren’t exactly what you’d call a camera-shy race. From taking their own photographs to shooting their own video – on an iphone, or a Flip – which you can upload to a site to take care of all the editing and the streaming – all for $29, the US market is flooded with ‘do it yourself’ and ‘host it yourself’ collateral.

Just one example:

Click here to view video. There’s even film-making and script-writing courses at HD Hat. In reviewing these ‘home’ movies, you have to say, they do the job. If you were interested in buying a particular home, I think they certainly show you enough of the property to make a judgement call on whether or not you phone the agent.
Add to this Google Maps and Street View, and buyers do have a vast arrange of free tools at their disposal.

From a Vendor’s perspective, why invest any money in quality marketing materials or even mass media for that matter. Just do it yourself and launch it to YouTube. Which raises another question; if marketing professions are being made redundant by technology, will ‘Agenting’ and negotiating skills follow? But if quality doesn’t really count, why has Google added a High Quality criteria to its searches for video? And why do big Companies spend millions on new creatives if any video describing a product will do?

Guess Jeans goes to awesome lengths, with multi-million dollar campaigns, just to sell a pair of pants yet most home-owners agonize over spending a few thousand to sell a million dollar asset.

The US housing market is a total mess. Making it ‘Cheap and easy’ to not only own a home – but sell one – hasn’t worked. Will Australian Agents ‘Flip’ over doing it themselves?

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Back in November the Google Vans were seen running around some of our capital cities photographing the streets to provide a 360 degree panoramic view right down at the street level.  Today Google Street View goes live in Australia but what everyone assumed at the time was that like the US, we would only have the large capital cities on Street View.  Newspapers are reporting that Google’s goal is to map virtually all streets in Australia including smaller and possibly even major highways.

For the next week we will be no doubt be bombarded with comments in the media about privacy concerns the same as when Google Maps was initially released but it will not take long to die down.

Personally I have found that up till now mapping has not been as a bigger impact with real estate online as thought it was going to be but Street View has the potential to become huge. Street View will allow buyers to really narrow down the field when looking for homes when used on top of the substantial number of internal photos already on most listings.

What a fantastic tool for our industry and there are dozens of way an agent can use this. The race will be on between portals and networks to integrate this feature into their websites.

Editor Note: Domain had this up and running yesterday

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Google has just announced that it will be bringing its ” Street View” images to Australia with images captured over the next several months and become available for viewing later this year.

Google Street View is an added feature of their highly popular Google Maps that provides 360° panoramic views of the street at ground level. It was launched in May this year in the US for a limited number of cities which has been slowly expanded.

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