Using Video To Rent or Sell A Home, Building, Condo

It seemed to us that in a competitive real estate market it might be useful to create a short video to show some of the features of a particular property. In order to use video that way you need to define your audience. Are they going to be interested in the view of the mountains? The industrial kitchen appliances? Still, on a very surface level, if you get more prospects to look at a place (without having to drive there and actually look at it) you're bound to gain something - maybe an extra $100 per month in rent? That's $1,200 over the course of a year, and certainly worth the time it takes to create and upload a video.
Here's The Entry And The Common Spaces of a home In Seattle
The Main Floor Bedrooms and Bath

This is of interest to the owner, who wants to distinguish their property in a crowded and confusing market.

This is also potentially of interest to a broker who wants to distinguish their services from other competing brokers!

In this scenario the broker can send a prospective listing client a link to a video of a similar property. While still images and panoramic walk-thrus are now quite common (check this site: Homeview.net) a full video walk-through with narration offers an opportunity to add a lot more depth - how the narrator interprets what's shown.

How It's Done:
1) A Sanyo Xacti HD camcorder that records on an SD chip is used to create short walk-thru vids. With a walk-through style, the camcorder doesn't have to be held that steadily. A little more motion produces a sense of "genuine-ness."
2) Put the SD chip into a notebook computer and move the files into a folder on the hard drive.
3) Open Vegas 8, create a project, and load the video files into the project.
4) Start Audacity application and record narrative as the video plays in the Vegas 8 timeline. Export an .mp3 file to the project folder and import to Vegas 8.
5) Paste the .mp3 narration into the timeline and adjust the starting point so the audio and video match.
6) Export a small .wmv file. I chose 320X280 30 frames-per-second 32kbps stereo sound, although 15 frames-per-second and mono sound would probably have been fine, and the filesize would have downloaded even faster.
7) You can upload the file*(s) to a host server in a number of ways. YouTube and other popular hosting services are easy. YouTube now accepts 640 X 480 output formats and HD files as large as 1 gig. If you want more quality, go into Vegas and output the file in a higher-resolution setting. You can also upload the file to your own server using an FTP client application.