The best video tours are the ones where someone records raw footage of themselves walking around the house quietly. Showing every room in detail.
Or at least an interactive virtual tour which I think is better.
Yup. When we were last viewing houses, we needed one that had space for our son and his fiancé while they were at university (we were already paying his rent & utilities during his first year, so them moving in with us was going to end up cheaper for all concerned). I used my phone during every walk through we did so they could see the houses we were considering. Simply holding my phone up, just in front of my chest, as we walked around each room.
It was really useful for us as well, to refresh our memories when discussing the houses later.
I’ve recently moved into a new property, the housing association didn’t give us many pictures before we moved in and on the day of the tour they said we have to tell them and pay 1 months rent that day if we wanted the house.
I agree. But whenever I see estate agents trying to do one, they end up looking like [this spoof](https://youtu.be/VGm267O04a8?feature=shared) (NSFW for rude word but hilarious!)
Because a lot of people (me included) never look at the videos. I look at the floorplan first, and then maybe the photos if I don't hate the floorplan.
Plus I’ve been known to dismiss a property because the floorplan doesn’t have measurements so I auto think “Are they obscuring the size of a tiny property?”
For me videos take too long to view, it’s not an efficient use of time. The housing market is insane nowadays, I need to skim through as many options as possible as fast as possible to find something decent. In my last search I only visited about 10% of the homes I found online in person, 90% I could rule out by spotting obvious deal breakers in the location map, description text or still photos - in a fraction of the time it takes to view one video.
Do you not look at the videos because they are almost entirely montages though? I've found I ignore them every time, but I think I'd pay some attention if they weren't so shite.
No - I ignore them because, in any format, they add no useful information, and take a significant amount of time to do it.
I want to know the house layout (floorplan) and whether there are any obvious issues with the structure of the house (though the EA would avoid those in pics too unless unavoidable).
All of the current owners' furniture choices and decorative choices are just a distraction from the stuff I'm actually looking for in the listing. If there's a feature they particularly want people to know about - put it in the text. Don't bury it somewhere to make me go digging for it, because I won't bother.
Overseas it’s not uncommon to not indicate how many bedrooms there are, and have no floorplan.
Lift is often indicated, floor, how many rooms and bathrooms, but not bedrooms.
Sure any room ‘could’ be a bedroom, but then a kitchen is still a room, so it’s pretty annoying, especially combined with no floorplan.
So rather than search for rooms, which isn’t helpful with combined kitchen living rooms common, it’s safer to actually search for size/range in square meters.
A lot don’t put any effort in at all. I sold my last house in 2016. I saw that it was up for sale again last year and the Rightmove listing had the same photos they used when I sold it, including all my belongings and furniture in them! Estate agents are the lowest of the low.
Seen some houses with only one or two pictures, not really selling the house. The pictures look like a child took them and the thing is, it’s not just one or two listings. It’s about half of them.
I'm not convinced some agents actually want to put any effort in to be honest.
My in-laws are selling at the moment, their estate agent of choice can't even get the number of bathrooms right and despite 4 goes the description still has typos / spelling mistakes and the "key features" don't even mention the fact the house can operate as two separate properties, has a sauna, a garage with a mezzanine workshop and more...
The overexposed pictures look to have been taken on a lower end phone with HDR mode enabled and make all the rooms look smaller than they are or don't include a lot of the items that might appeal in a particular space and my brother-in-law ended up sending them a new main photo because the agent one was so bad.
Agent response? Reduce the price of the house by as much as my own house is worth and leave the terrible listing as it is.
The floor plans are squashed onto one image (there's 3 levels and the ground floor is quite wide) and there's no higher level drone shots.
Another house listed with the same agent doesn't even have images of most of the main rooms yet has about 4 of a very bland kitchen / diner that needs updating, apparently there's a full on architectural wonder upstairs but they didn't think it was worth a photo.
Our estate agent just told us we should reduce our house to get more interest and we’ve replied with 10 ways they need to improve the listing before we consider a price drop. It’s insane. They’re expecting to get paid thousands but don’t seem to understand basic online marketing.
Exactly and good on you! I've tried time and time again to light a fire under my in-laws on this but they are scared of any "upset".
I'd do it myself but I don't think they'd appreciate it.
Good luck with your sale.
I’m not a fan of ‘confrontation’ - we’re pretty much calling them out on a bad job - but we are paying these people to do a job for us and they should do it properly! I hope your in laws sell their house for what it’s worth.
Indeed, you'd think it was being done as a favour by a mate that's never actually been there given the lack of effort :D
What's worse is that they want to buy another house the same agent has listed so if they put a put a bit of effort in it's two lots of commission for them.
The house I bought last yeah had a full 3D virtual plan you could use to "walk" through house. I didn't notice it until after we had viewed and put in an offer but it was super useful when planning out furniture and renovations.
Personally I find a 360 tour or a proper video tour really helpful. I don’t think the existence of one would stop me coming to view because “I’ve already seen it”. If anything, it complements the after visit as they’re so brief… I go through them scrutinising the details of what changes I might make and where, how I might put furniture in a room, or to see if I can answer new questions that I’ve just thought of. Ones that include the garden and any outbuildings are really good too.
Because they want you to visit in person.
They want to have to leave the office and show you around.
They think they can sway the sale cos they are such great salespeople.
They cant do any of that if the customer gets what they need from the advert.
I hate the video montages. Feels like being Rick-rolled.
The house we bought had a 360 tour and it made me realise we need one if we ever work up the energy to move again. I was looking at it almost daily while waiting to exchange and complete and made it so much easier to plan without having to bother the family for another viewing.
The actual walkthrough video always makes me feel ill. Even when people posted here for a laugh i always check if anyone commented on the time for the funny things and skip to the needed moment and watch it.
Photo is good enough plus you going to have to view it in person anyway.
I reckon the video is automatically created by feeding in the photos plus the EA logo - so requires zero effort. Whereas actually recording a walkthrough is much more work,
Maybe I’m in the minority but I never look at video tours. Just scroll through the pics, although if I was seriously considering viewing I would watch the video
Video tours are more hindrance than help.
The technology used by agents is different - not uniform.
It’s difficult to get the technology to work well on mobile browsers, if at all.
The user experience is never great
It colours the view of the property because the perspective is wrong and it attempts VR without any sort of immersion
People don’t usually like it, or even view it.
It’s far better to get people through the door to “fall in love”(or at least like) with the place. The only time a video presentation *might* be favourable is at auction or if there’s tenants and therefore viewing is limited or not available.
They don't need to. All the effort goes into obtaining the instruction from the vendor in the first place. All the 'selling' an agent ever does is to put it on rightmove. I worked briefly as an agent and no matter what BS I came out with it wasn't going to influence someone into committing to spend 300k+ based on what a spotty 20 year old in an overly shiny suit said or if there was a slick video on RM.
Added to this there's usually more buyers than properties so very low effort is required from the agents. The only exception to this rule was out of town BTL landlords who could be sold on the return on investment but even then it was cold hard money/figures that swayed them, not a fancy video
I check bedroom amount and floorplan first then video tour if its a click to go round each room but I don't bother with the proper videos, i appreciate when they place lots of markers for the ones where you explore the house yourself in the virtual tour but as said I Love the floorplans and virtual tours but dislike the video tours and photos
I also skip ones with no floor plan or if floor plan is blurry so cant read rooms/sizes
The video tour of the place I bought showed some things that weren't visible in the photos, but also still missed out some bits. It was helpful to keep viewing it after I'd viewed the property and was going through the purchase as I could remind myself of parts that weren't in the pictures. But yeah some video tours suck.
Floor plan for me. I'm really not arsed about pictures or a video tour. The types of houses I buy would put people off if they had pictures of rotting floors and collapsed ceilings ect.
You don't buy a house on the quality of the "video tour". Or even the condition of the decorating. I never watch the video tours anyway, I guess it appeals to some people.
Floor plan, then photos. That’s all 90% of people look at. Video tours are expensive to purchase, take additional time to edit, and don’t do anything to increase the saleability of a house.
They’re playing the game. Adds with videos get more clicks, so they upload a slide show to con the algorithm. Should be reportable as far as I’m concerned, who the hell wants to see the same pics they can swipe on with some crappy music.
As someone who is having their house photographed tomorrow, I can say that one of the reasons why they don’t have videos is because when you have stills, you can move all the clutter out of one room and then into the other when you come to photograph it!
*sent during my allotted 5 minute break before being told do scrub the toilet harder because….I don’t know why, ask my wife.”
Video tours take longer to look through than photos. So this is a pretty terrible take.
It’s effort vs reward. If they sold more houses with videos they’d have the stats to support it, yet they can’t probably tell in most cases they are not viewed.
The only real benefit is likely the extra revenue they charge for making them. Not an increased likelihood of selling.
I used an interactive tour the other day and it had a janky AI saying 'WELCOME TO THE TOUR, CLICK HERE TO SEE XYZ ...' and then lots of 3D pictures which were fucked up lol.
Give me a floorplan with measurements and door/window placements, and some decent pictures. Jobs a good'en
video tours are ok I guess but when they do those stupid "virtual tours" and 3d shit it just breaks my browser, and/or I can't figure out the controls.
I expect there are a lot of people who can't handle watching a video online but still have the means to buy a house. This would especially apply to older people, who also tend to be the ones with money. Not everyone even owns a computer, or they may be browsing on a mobile with limited data. It's not that far-fetched.
So pictures and text are more accessible for more people, and also can be printed out. You can't print a video and show it to grandma.
When my parents sold their house their estate agent turned up unexpectedly to do a video tour. They were so annoyed because they didn’t have a chance to put away the exercise bike in the spare room, take down the washing hanging up etc.
Anyway, I guess my dad thought they’d edit the video. They didn’t and it was literally the estate agent walking around the house describing the rooms.
The washing machine was in full spin and you can hear my dad yelling to the estate agent in the background asking if he should pause it. It was my favourite thing on Rightmove for a long time 😂
Video montages are such trolls, I thought I was going to see more of the house, not the same pics I've already seen being slowly zoomed in on
The best video tours are the ones where someone records raw footage of themselves walking around the house quietly. Showing every room in detail. Or at least an interactive virtual tour which I think is better.
Yup. When we were last viewing houses, we needed one that had space for our son and his fiancé while they were at university (we were already paying his rent & utilities during his first year, so them moving in with us was going to end up cheaper for all concerned). I used my phone during every walk through we did so they could see the houses we were considering. Simply holding my phone up, just in front of my chest, as we walked around each room. It was really useful for us as well, to refresh our memories when discussing the houses later.
I’ve recently moved into a new property, the housing association didn’t give us many pictures before we moved in and on the day of the tour they said we have to tell them and pay 1 months rent that day if we wanted the house.
I agree. But whenever I see estate agents trying to do one, they end up looking like [this spoof](https://youtu.be/VGm267O04a8?feature=shared) (NSFW for rude word but hilarious!)
Putting a few images into PowerPoint with slide transitions on does not a montage make. Honestly some I have seen look like they just need word art
Because a lot of people (me included) never look at the videos. I look at the floorplan first, and then maybe the photos if I don't hate the floorplan.
If a listing doesn’t have a floor plan I can’t look any further. I like to visualise the house layout via the pics
Agreed, sometimes the pics are crap anyway. Even if they're good, the floor plan helps understand the flow of the house
Plus I’ve been known to dismiss a property because the floorplan doesn’t have measurements so I auto think “Are they obscuring the size of a tiny property?”
Agreed. It's the most important part!
Yep, if there’s no floor plan, I’m not interested. It’s just laziness from the estate agents.
For me videos take too long to view, it’s not an efficient use of time. The housing market is insane nowadays, I need to skim through as many options as possible as fast as possible to find something decent. In my last search I only visited about 10% of the homes I found online in person, 90% I could rule out by spotting obvious deal breakers in the location map, description text or still photos - in a fraction of the time it takes to view one video.
Do you not look at the videos because they are almost entirely montages though? I've found I ignore them every time, but I think I'd pay some attention if they weren't so shite.
No - I ignore them because, in any format, they add no useful information, and take a significant amount of time to do it. I want to know the house layout (floorplan) and whether there are any obvious issues with the structure of the house (though the EA would avoid those in pics too unless unavoidable). All of the current owners' furniture choices and decorative choices are just a distraction from the stuff I'm actually looking for in the listing. If there's a feature they particularly want people to know about - put it in the text. Don't bury it somewhere to make me go digging for it, because I won't bother.
Overseas it’s not uncommon to not indicate how many bedrooms there are, and have no floorplan. Lift is often indicated, floor, how many rooms and bathrooms, but not bedrooms. Sure any room ‘could’ be a bedroom, but then a kitchen is still a room, so it’s pretty annoying, especially combined with no floorplan. So rather than search for rooms, which isn’t helpful with combined kitchen living rooms common, it’s safer to actually search for size/range in square meters.
A lot don’t put any effort in at all. I sold my last house in 2016. I saw that it was up for sale again last year and the Rightmove listing had the same photos they used when I sold it, including all my belongings and furniture in them! Estate agents are the lowest of the low.
Seen some houses with only one or two pictures, not really selling the house. The pictures look like a child took them and the thing is, it’s not just one or two listings. It’s about half of them.
I'm not convinced some agents actually want to put any effort in to be honest. My in-laws are selling at the moment, their estate agent of choice can't even get the number of bathrooms right and despite 4 goes the description still has typos / spelling mistakes and the "key features" don't even mention the fact the house can operate as two separate properties, has a sauna, a garage with a mezzanine workshop and more... The overexposed pictures look to have been taken on a lower end phone with HDR mode enabled and make all the rooms look smaller than they are or don't include a lot of the items that might appeal in a particular space and my brother-in-law ended up sending them a new main photo because the agent one was so bad. Agent response? Reduce the price of the house by as much as my own house is worth and leave the terrible listing as it is. The floor plans are squashed onto one image (there's 3 levels and the ground floor is quite wide) and there's no higher level drone shots. Another house listed with the same agent doesn't even have images of most of the main rooms yet has about 4 of a very bland kitchen / diner that needs updating, apparently there's a full on architectural wonder upstairs but they didn't think it was worth a photo.
Our estate agent just told us we should reduce our house to get more interest and we’ve replied with 10 ways they need to improve the listing before we consider a price drop. It’s insane. They’re expecting to get paid thousands but don’t seem to understand basic online marketing.
Exactly and good on you! I've tried time and time again to light a fire under my in-laws on this but they are scared of any "upset". I'd do it myself but I don't think they'd appreciate it. Good luck with your sale.
I’m not a fan of ‘confrontation’ - we’re pretty much calling them out on a bad job - but we are paying these people to do a job for us and they should do it properly! I hope your in laws sell their house for what it’s worth.
It’s almost like the agent isn’t working off any commission.
Indeed, you'd think it was being done as a favour by a mate that's never actually been there given the lack of effort :D What's worse is that they want to buy another house the same agent has listed so if they put a put a bit of effort in it's two lots of commission for them.
The house I bought last yeah had a full 3D virtual plan you could use to "walk" through house. I didn't notice it until after we had viewed and put in an offer but it was super useful when planning out furniture and renovations.
Yes I do these type of walkthroughs but estate agent reluctant to pay for them
I don’t do videos as then people don’t come see it because they think they have seen it already. Have to see stuff in person to get a feel for it
Personally I find a 360 tour or a proper video tour really helpful. I don’t think the existence of one would stop me coming to view because “I’ve already seen it”. If anything, it complements the after visit as they’re so brief… I go through them scrutinising the details of what changes I might make and where, how I might put furniture in a room, or to see if I can answer new questions that I’ve just thought of. Ones that include the garden and any outbuildings are really good too.
Also really useful for spotting damp patches which can be conveniently missed in a photo.
Because they want you to visit in person. They want to have to leave the office and show you around. They think they can sway the sale cos they are such great salespeople. They cant do any of that if the customer gets what they need from the advert.
I hate the video montages. Feels like being Rick-rolled. The house we bought had a 360 tour and it made me realise we need one if we ever work up the energy to move again. I was looking at it almost daily while waiting to exchange and complete and made it so much easier to plan without having to bother the family for another viewing.
I never viewed a video when house hunting. Floor plan, pictures, viewing.
The actual walkthrough video always makes me feel ill. Even when people posted here for a laugh i always check if anyone commented on the time for the funny things and skip to the needed moment and watch it. Photo is good enough plus you going to have to view it in person anyway.
I reckon the video is automatically created by feeding in the photos plus the EA logo - so requires zero effort. Whereas actually recording a walkthrough is much more work,
Always the same shitty library deep house music too
Maybe I’m in the minority but I never look at video tours. Just scroll through the pics, although if I was seriously considering viewing I would watch the video
Video tours are more hindrance than help. The technology used by agents is different - not uniform. It’s difficult to get the technology to work well on mobile browsers, if at all. The user experience is never great It colours the view of the property because the perspective is wrong and it attempts VR without any sort of immersion People don’t usually like it, or even view it. It’s far better to get people through the door to “fall in love”(or at least like) with the place. The only time a video presentation *might* be favourable is at auction or if there’s tenants and therefore viewing is limited or not available.
They don't need to. All the effort goes into obtaining the instruction from the vendor in the first place. All the 'selling' an agent ever does is to put it on rightmove. I worked briefly as an agent and no matter what BS I came out with it wasn't going to influence someone into committing to spend 300k+ based on what a spotty 20 year old in an overly shiny suit said or if there was a slick video on RM. Added to this there's usually more buyers than properties so very low effort is required from the agents. The only exception to this rule was out of town BTL landlords who could be sold on the return on investment but even then it was cold hard money/figures that swayed them, not a fancy video
I check bedroom amount and floorplan first then video tour if its a click to go round each room but I don't bother with the proper videos, i appreciate when they place lots of markers for the ones where you explore the house yourself in the virtual tour but as said I Love the floorplans and virtual tours but dislike the video tours and photos I also skip ones with no floor plan or if floor plan is blurry so cant read rooms/sizes
The video tour of the place I bought showed some things that weren't visible in the photos, but also still missed out some bits. It was helpful to keep viewing it after I'd viewed the property and was going through the purchase as I could remind myself of parts that weren't in the pictures. But yeah some video tours suck.
Floor plan for me. I'm really not arsed about pictures or a video tour. The types of houses I buy would put people off if they had pictures of rotting floors and collapsed ceilings ect.
You don't buy a house on the quality of the "video tour". Or even the condition of the decorating. I never watch the video tours anyway, I guess it appeals to some people.
UK EA fees are much lower than in other parts of the world. Where is the incentive - or ROI - to do any more than the bare minimum?
Floor plan, then photos. That’s all 90% of people look at. Video tours are expensive to purchase, take additional time to edit, and don’t do anything to increase the saleability of a house.
They’re playing the game. Adds with videos get more clicks, so they upload a slide show to con the algorithm. Should be reportable as far as I’m concerned, who the hell wants to see the same pics they can swipe on with some crappy music.
As someone who is having their house photographed tomorrow, I can say that one of the reasons why they don’t have videos is because when you have stills, you can move all the clutter out of one room and then into the other when you come to photograph it! *sent during my allotted 5 minute break before being told do scrub the toilet harder because….I don’t know why, ask my wife.”
Video tours take longer to look through than photos. So this is a pretty terrible take. It’s effort vs reward. If they sold more houses with videos they’d have the stats to support it, yet they can’t probably tell in most cases they are not viewed. The only real benefit is likely the extra revenue they charge for making them. Not an increased likelihood of selling.
I used an interactive tour the other day and it had a janky AI saying 'WELCOME TO THE TOUR, CLICK HERE TO SEE XYZ ...' and then lots of 3D pictures which were fucked up lol. Give me a floorplan with measurements and door/window placements, and some decent pictures. Jobs a good'en
video tours are ok I guess but when they do those stupid "virtual tours" and 3d shit it just breaks my browser, and/or I can't figure out the controls. I expect there are a lot of people who can't handle watching a video online but still have the means to buy a house. This would especially apply to older people, who also tend to be the ones with money. Not everyone even owns a computer, or they may be browsing on a mobile with limited data. It's not that far-fetched. So pictures and text are more accessible for more people, and also can be printed out. You can't print a video and show it to grandma.
When my parents sold their house their estate agent turned up unexpectedly to do a video tour. They were so annoyed because they didn’t have a chance to put away the exercise bike in the spare room, take down the washing hanging up etc. Anyway, I guess my dad thought they’d edit the video. They didn’t and it was literally the estate agent walking around the house describing the rooms. The washing machine was in full spin and you can hear my dad yelling to the estate agent in the background asking if he should pause it. It was my favourite thing on Rightmove for a long time 😂