I get questions about Video Tours fairly often, specifically “What are they?” and “How are they different from Zillow Walkthroughs?” Mostly, what they want to know is what justifies the big price jump from a Zillow Walkthrough to a full Video Tour.

What Are Video Tours?
Video Tours are fully produced, properly edited videos set to music and shot with proper camera and technique. They aren’t wobbly, they show off the beauty of the house, and they look like a professional commercial shoot should look. They take about the same amount of time to shoot as photos do (which is dependent upon square footage of the listing), and they take roughly twice as long to edit as the pictures do.

For this reason their price point tends to run somewhere around 1.5x(ish) the price of photos. The other huge advantage to Standard Video Tours is that they can be used on RMLS and all over the web, while Zillow Walkthroughs can only be viewed on Zillow or Trulia (Video Tours and Virtual Tours, which are just slideshows made from stills, can be connected to your listing’s Zillow page under the Other Interior Features>Virtual Tour field). Here is a recent video tour so you can see what one looks like:

How Are Video Tours Different From Zillow Walkthroughs?
For every shoot we do with Standard Video, we also throw in a complimentary Zillow Walkthrough so the listing gets the search ranking bump on Zillow that come with the Zillow Walkthroughs, which means that the Thurston Lane shoot has both a Standard Video and a Zillow Walkthgouh. If you’d like to see a direct comparison between the two video types for the same listing, you can see the Zillow Walkthrough for Thurston Lane here:

The two videos look completely different, don’t they? If you pretend you are taking your SAT’s again, you can remind yourself that Video Tours are to Zillow Walkthroughs as professional real estate photographs are to cell phone pics. 🙂

Our Thoughts:
Video Tours and Zillow Walkthroughs, while similar in that they are both video products, are two completely different animals designed for different types of homes, buyers, and purposes. If you have a mid- to high-end home that you want to show to best advantage for prospective buyers both locally and nationally, or if you want video to post on RMLS or your own website, the Standard Video Tour is what you want. If you have a lower-end listing that you want a quick and dirty video showing the flow of the house plus a bump in the Zillow search rankings, then a Zillow Walkthrough is for you.