Learn How to Land, Shoot, & Edit Real Estate Videos
This course gives you an in-depth look at how I land, shoot, compose, choose camera settings, create movement, story tell, edit, and make money as it relates to real estate videos.
How do I Land Real Estate Gigs? Who to approach? What to say?
(This is probably my most commonly asked question when it comes to real estate videos)
The most important factor I’ve found to land real estate clients is to Have a strong demo video or portfolio. You can be the smoothest talker in the world, but if your work sucks… no one will hire you. Your work should do most of the talking for you. If you don’t have a demo video then I’d go out offering my services for free to real estate agents until someone agrees to let you shoot a free video, that you can then use as a demo video to land future clients. Be aware though, real estate agents won’t be willing to pay decent money for a real estate video unless they have a lot of commission on the line. That’s why I recommend only targeting LUXURY LISTINGS! Because agents of luxury listing will usually have marketing budgets for videos. And by Luxury I mean multi million dollar listings. The smallest listing I’ve done a video for was about 1 million dollars, and I’ve done up to 11 million dollar listings. So I would try and target homes in that range if I were you.
As far as the logistics of getting in contact with a real estate agent, go drive through luxury neighborhoods looking for sale signs, and call the number of the agent on the sign.Or, Go online and look for luxury listings near you, and contact the agent.Really not that hard to make contact. What should you say when contacting them? Well, tell them you want to shoot real estate videos for them, then send them a demo video of your work, and I recommend Telling them what you normally charge but that you’ll do the first one for free or cheap to show them the value it will bring to their business..I like to Focus on building relationships rather than making a quick buck so that they will hire me long term to do many more properties.
Now I asked my real estate agent specifically, what do you look for when a videographer reaches out to you about shooting video for you, besides obviously the quality of their work, and he said The two big things that are important to him are: BEING AVAILABLE! And Having a quick turn around time. Agents never know when they’ll need a video done, but when they do, they need it quick, so you have to be willing to be flexibly with your time and squeeze them in your schedule even if you have a busy week.
And Once the video is shot, they need that video turned around quick!I usually send the first cut back to the client within a day or 2, so they can give me any feedback and we can finish the project within a week or 2.So let’s assume you’ve done a free video, the agent loved it and now they want to start hiring you to do more work….
How Much Should I Charge?
Now this depends on how long it will take to shoot the house, and what your time is worth based on your skill level. But just to give you an idea, most real estate videos take me about 4-5 hours to shoot, so I charge my half day rate which is around $1,000. Then it takes another 4-5 hours to edit the video for which I charge $500.
Then add on the music license and a voice over and I’m usually around $1,800-$2000 for a basic real estate video. If it’s a larger home that takes a full day, I’d charge my full day rate, if they want on camera actors, we add those costs on as well. And We’ve actually created a budget calculator that comes with Full Time Filmmaker that helps you determine your skill level, so you can know how much your time is worth, and then times that by how long the video will take to determine what price you should charge.
