Posting Luxury Real Estate Videos to YouTube is a waste of Time and Money

Here is a good example of why posting luxury real estate videos on YouTube is a complete waste of time. This one is of a luxury home in England, and much has been made of the fact that it has managed to achieve the almost-unheard of amount of 690,000 views. Admittedly, that amount of views seems impressive, and the company marketing the property, HomesGoFast.com has even gone to the trouble of releasing another press release describing the success of this video. The press release reads -

An English luxury home being offered for sale at a cool 5 Million pounds (approx 7.3 million USD) has created a stir amongst YouTube users with some 690,000 views. The huge 14,365 sq ft home being promoted by overseas property portal Homesgofast.com. The new house set in the Essex UK countryside is one of the largest new homes built in the South East of England and would befit any celebrity seeking a secluded location.

The video shows the home grounds and designer interior including luxury pool and some of nine bedrooms that all have en suite facilities; the video even shows the huge home from the air.

I am not sure “stir,” would be an appropriate description judging from the comments left on youtube. 309 comments from 690,000 views doesn’t seem like much of a stir to me. “5 million for this piece of junk? WOW, someone is going to be ripped off,” being a typical example of the comments.

One thing to bear in mind when looking at the success or failure of this video is this. The video was posted to youtube on October 22nd, 2007 -

And is still for sale more than a year later

So as far as sales success, not really much to write home about. Admittedly, the financial crisis has since intervened, but luxury properties of this value were still selling in the UK until mid-2008. There may be some ancillary benefits as far as promoting the website goes (I have linked to them - and posted the video here), but no success with a sale. So what is the problem? How is it that 690,000 views did not translate into a sale?

Simple - the title of this video is ” Millionaires Mansion MTV Crib Style Home,” and actually comes up in the first page of google video search results for the search term, “MTV crib,” which is no mean feat. But begs the question - Are people searching the internet for MTV cribs the type of users that are likely to purchase a five million pound house in the UK? And that is a rhetorical question.

The video itself is a pretty poor quality slideshow and I imagine a lot of people were disappointed if they came looking for some dirt on an MTV rapper’s digs. This is the video in question -

There are far more effective ways of using video to market a luxury home, not least of which is first of all employing a professional videographer to shoot a high-quality video, finding a suitable video hosting company and then advertising the property to a luxury audience.

A good example of over-promoting a poor quality product to the wrong audience. I imagine 600 well-targeted viewers would have been more successful that 690,000 voyeurs.

Edit - And there it was, “Video Removed by User.” - Can’t say I blame them.