{"id":3462,"date":"2008-07-23T08:33:38","date_gmt":"2008-07-23T15:33:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/?p=3462"},"modified":"2008-07-23T12:17:47","modified_gmt":"2008-07-23T19:17:47","slug":"whats-better-than-a-hokey-faux-video-photo-based-virtual-tour-how-about-a-free-hokey-faux-video-photo-based-virtual-tour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/3462\/whats-better-than-a-hokey-faux-video-photo-based-virtual-tour-how-about-a-free-hokey-faux-video-photo-based-virtual-tour\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s better than a hokey faux-video photo-based virtual tour? How about a FREE hokey faux-video photo-based virtual tour?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/em> solution, charging start-up fees, per use fees and monthly hosting fees — which can turn into a boatload of money real fast.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The good news: These kinds of tours have always been pretty cheap.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n

All virtual tours suck to one degree or another, but the best of the breed right now is Obeo.com<\/a>. You get the panoramas and the pro-photographer photos, the neighborhood information, all that stuff. But what you get with Obeo and no one Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,9,5,19],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3462","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-disintermediation","7":"category-marketing","8":"category-photography","9":"category-real-estate","10":"category-technology","12":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6918,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/6918\/the-activerain-hokey-pokey-you-shoot-your-left-foot-off-you-shoot-your-right-foot-off-you-shoot-your-left-hand-off-and-then-you-present-the-audience-with-an-invoice\/","url_meta":{"origin":3462,"position":0},"title":"The ActiveRain hokey pokey: You shoot your left foot off, you shoot your right foot off, you shoot your left hand off — and then you present the audience with an invoice…","author":"Greg Swann","date":"February 16, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"What costs $360 a year and puts you in touch with vast hordes of sweet people who cannot do business with you? Starting today, Active Rain will cost $30 a month for new members. That's a load of dough. If you want to host your own WordPress.org weblog, a perfectly\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/blogging\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":129,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/129\/is-all-video-good-video\/","url_meta":{"origin":3462,"position":1},"title":"Is all video good video?","author":"Greg Swann","date":"July 24, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"The Real Estate Bloggers have a post on using YouTube video to sell homes:As more people are using high speed bandwidth, the smart real estate agents are using tools such as YouTube to put listings on the internet. This McKinney, Texas real estate agent put together a 40 second teaser\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/blogging\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2814,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/2814\/listing-real-estate-the-bloodhound-way-virtual-remodeling\/","url_meta":{"origin":3462,"position":2},"title":"Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: Virtual remodeling","author":"Greg Swann","date":"March 21, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I wrote about Obeo's virtual remodeling feature when first I discovered it (they call it Style Designer). As far as I'm concerned, this one feature is a total category killer among virtual tours. Panoramas? Check. Ken Burns zooming tricks? Check. Cheesy music loops ripped-off from CHiPs and Charlie's Angels? Check.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Marketing"","block_context":{"text":"Marketing","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/marketing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3152,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/3152\/bloodhoundblog-unchained-commencement-news-and-then-to-bed\/","url_meta":{"origin":3462,"position":3},"title":"BloodhoundBlog Unchained: Commencement news, and then to bed","author":"Greg Swann","date":"May 20, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"I've already been to sleep once, briefly. After Unchained broke up this afternoon, we came home to knock out the essential work. Teri Lussier cranked out a solid hour of video clips today, so I started pumping those into the YouTube mill. I've got a lot more to talk about,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/blogging\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9867,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/9867\/imovie-lets-me-produce-six-short-real-estate-videos-in-three-hours\/","url_meta":{"origin":3462,"position":4},"title":"iMovie lets me produce six short real estate videos in three hours","author":"Greg Swann","date":"September 27, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"I've never loved video as a means of promoting real estate listings. I much prefer lots and lots of really big, really detailed photographs. But: The SMS marketing we're doing with DriveBuy Technologies makes video a necessity. The integration of YouTube into smart-phones is simply too compelling an opportunity to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "BloodhoundBlog.TV"","block_context":{"text":"BloodhoundBlog.TV","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/bloodhoundblogtv\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3494,"url":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/3494\/russell-shaw-at-starpower-decide-youre-going-to-do-it\/","url_meta":{"origin":3462,"position":5},"title":"Russell Shaw at StarPower: “Decide you’re going to do it.”","author":"Greg Swann","date":"July 25, 2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Here's Russ yesterday. Sorry for the quality. We were at opposite ends of a packed room. As a bonus, here's a quick clip of the trade show floor: Didn't expect to have anything nice to say about the vendors, but Kristin Combs from Obeo is here. Worse news for cheap\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Marketing"","block_context":{"text":"Marketing","link":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/category\/marketing\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3462"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3464,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3462\/revisions\/3464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bloodhoundrealty.com\/BloodhoundBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}