YouTube Listing Videos

I have received quite a few questions and requests for changes and updates on the YouTube videos that are auto-generated for all of our listings.  I thought I’d create a breakdown of our internal procedures and limitations to help everyone to understand the process and to avoid any issues.  

We started creating YouTube videos for all of our listings because of the incredible power that they possess with search engine indexing by property address. When we post a video to YouTube, the address of the property then becomes searchable on search engines like Google. YouTube is fantastic for this and one of the best, fastest and least expensive ways for us to accomplish something that was next to impossible only a few years ago. Although we have found a very practical Real Estate use for YouTube’s platform, it was not created with our industry in mind. YouTube likes us posting lots of content up to their site, what they don’t like is us attempting to update that content often. On top of the platform limitations, we have an enormous amount of listings. This means that the only practical way that we could accomplish creating videos for each one would be with an automated process. The following list is a breakdown of the process and should provide a framework to follow to help us to avoid having to make difficult updates to videos after posting.   

1. Videos are automatically generated 5 days from the time the listing comes through to us from the MLS in the IDX feed. Make sure that your images are loaded up to the MLS within the 5 day period.
2. We create the videos with the photo content that comes directly from the MLS not the images that you may have updated in the Real Estate One Listing Manager. The video will be created using the exact order the images follow in the MLS so double check to make sure your images are in the correct order in the MLS.
3. We only create videos for listings that have 5 or more images.
4. The videos are created with an automated process and the images can not be updated or edited. The only way that we can change a video’s image content is by removing the video altogether and creating a completely new video. Removing and reposting a video will only be done as a last resort and will result in a loss of any indexing that the search engines had established for the original video.   
5. Price changes take a little longer to update to videos so a delay of a couple of days can be expected as we are only allowed a finite number of updates to YouTube each day.
6.  We also automatically attach a link for the YouTube video to any of our listings that do not have a virtual tour attached on the Real Estate One Family of Companies web sites and to all of the sites that we syndicate your listing to.
7. An individual email is sent out to the listing agent containing a link to the video and two separate .avi video files, branded and unbranded, that can be uploaded to other video sites or to your listings on other services. 

 The videos are created from the images that you upload to your individual MLS and the upload process actually compresses the finished video for optimized play back. This means that the quality of the video will reflect the quality of the originally uploaded images. In other words, if the original images are of poor quality the resulting video will also be of poor quality.

The central purpose behind creating these videos is for search engine optimization and to compliment, not replace, other higher quality online listing presentation solutions like virtual, slide show or floor plan tours.