Displaying a softening market and slowing economy, today many real estate developers and agents must work harder to sell properties, which would have been snapped up last year by enthusiastic buyers looking to secure property in rising property prices. Now, with price appreciation slowing, properties that would have once been easy to sell take more time and require creative marketing. Agents are now turning towards online video and virtual tours to market our listings and our businesses.



Despite the slowing real estate market, innovation is running at full speed. It's a brand-new world out there, are you keen to be part of it? While it's already a known fact that about 80% of home buyers begin their search on the Internet, there's still a large demand for originality among real estate Web sites, and this is were online video steps in.

With the advent of YouTube and other online video outlets, video is naturally becoming a huge part of online marketing in real estate. Agents are using it to do property tours. Web sites such as Realty Tube.com.au are becoming marketplaces that link up agents and video professionals that stream their video tours for no fee. Some nice options of such a site as Realty Tube Australia include a video player that agents can embed in their Web sites and post video links into forums, blogs and emails.

Gone are the days of scrappy newspaper ads and dead floor plans. Brochures are more like magazines, with fashion spreads and interviews. The one thing you can count on for sure a high-quality print ad can cost you anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 to place a single picture in a magazine for one time. But by having just one video can put you on hundreds of places on the Internet. In a time when more people are becoming increasingly careful about their advertising budgets, videos may provide one of the best sources for a high return on advertising dollars.

With YouTube practically a household name and digicams and video-editing software becoming ever more sophisticated and affordable, digital video is suddenly where the action is. Videos offer opportunities to highlight areas of a property allowing a whole new dimension. With the equipment available today, you don't need to spend thousands of dollars on a camera. You can take shots, hand the content over to someone who can edit for as little as one to two hundred dollars, and make a respectable video. It easily beats blowing thousands on a one off advert in a magazine to never be published again.

If you do not have the skills or time, sites such as Realty Tube provides an invaluable service of video specialists to help produce your listing. Also if you are not too concerned about mixed audiences from other video sites, Realty Tube can arrange full production of your video as well as submit and manage your listing to major video portals such as Google Video, AOL, YouTube, Metacafe and of course their own site Realty Tube.com.au

Video marketing is the way to go. People like to be entertained while they learn and that is what a video will do. Sound and vision combined generates higher recall in the minds of viewers. It is known that 90% of people only glance over photos and text.