There’s always something to howl about.

What’s better than a hokey faux-video photo-based virtual tour? How about a FREE hokey faux-video photo-based virtual tour?

One of the factors that unites the vendors who annoy me is that they tend to do things that are fast, cheap and obvious, then market them like manna from the heavens. Still worse is doing something fast, cheap and obvious as a hosted solution, charging start-up fees, per use fees and monthly hosting fees — which can turn into a boatload of money real fast.

The back side of doing things that are fast, cheap and obvious is that the product category quickly becomes a commodity, with the corresponding free fall in prices. The dipshit thing may not be worth having, but at least it doesn’t cost much.

Today the economy of abundance comes to Ken-Burns-style virtual tours. Documentarian Ken Burns and others perfected a style of cinematography that lends motion to still photos by panning across and zooming in on the images. This turns out to be a fast, cheap and obvious way to build cheesy little faux-video virtual tours.

The good news: These kinds of tours have always been pretty cheap.

The bad news: They’re video, even if there is no actual live motion, so they occupy huge amounts of disk space and consume big bunches of bandwidth.

The worse news: They suck. As with true video, they only work as virtual tours as the secondary tour, the back-up or the teaser. All virtual tour solutions suck, but the faux-video photo-based virtual tour sucks big time.

The purpose of a virtual tour is to get the viewer to commit to the home, and the only way to do that is by way of the commitment of time. Any real estate promotion that excuses the buyer after a minute or two — as all video solutions do — is sub-optimal. The ideal virtual tour will offer the buyer more and more tools to play with, more and more ways to “try on” the home.

All virtual tours suck to one degree or another, but the best of the breed right now is Obeo.com. You get the panoramas and the pro-photographer photos, the neighborhood information, all that stuff. But what you get with Obeo and no one else is virtual remodeling, a chance for your buyers to make your not-quite-right listing their own. This is a category-killer. For now, Obeo has no competitors in the virtual tour category.

On the other hand, the vendors of faux-video photo-based virtual tours may well have wet the bed last night. Why? Because the price of their product dropped to zero dollars and zero cents:

PropertyPreviews.com today announced the launch of its new Web site, which provides real estate professionals, photographers and home sellers with free and easy-to-use technology to instantly create engaging real estate video tours. In addition, the site is a one-click stop for distributing videos and property information to real estate and video sites including YouTube, Trulia, Zillow, Oodle, Google and others. PropertyPreviews.com users never need to install software, sign contracts or incur video or subscription fees to use the free video creation service.

“Research shows that 84 percent of home buyers begin their home searches online,” said Jeff Harris, General Manager for PropertyPreviews.com. “Giving these prospective buyers an interactive, visual experience viewable from computers and iPhones enables real estate professionals and sellers to effectively market their properties. It’s like having an Open House, 24-hours a day.”

Photos uploaded to PropertyPreviews.com are automatically converted into a Controlled Motion Video (CMV). CMV gives visual movement to static property images to create videos without the typical pixelization and loss of quality of videotaped tours. While the video creation is automated, users can personalize tours with editing tools and a variety of background music selections. PropertyPreviews.com creates the video tour and displays the property details, tour and photos in an ePostcard that can be distributed to an agent’s Web site or other real estate listing services.

PropertyPreviews.com distributes the property information to a variety of Web sites, including Zillow, Trulia, Oodle, Google and YouTube — with one click of a button, and at no cost. The site also provides the ability to buy such marketing materials as DVDs, 5×7 photo books and to distribute the video tour to Realtor.com.

I think the words “Realtor.com” may be the actual monetization strategy, but I don’t have to care. Faux-video photo-based virtual tours might be hokey, and they might be pretty poor marketing tools, but — what the heck? — they’re FREE! My day is officially made.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,