Why Hasn’t Video Caught on in Commercial Real Estate

Have you ever toured way too many spaces with a tenant or investor? Some of the tours could

have been ruled out by a virtual tour.

I’ve seen many videos or virtual tours produced for houses for sale. I’ve often wondered, why

hasn’t this practice caught on in commercial? After all, a video can show much more than a

plain flyer or an email; and is more pleasing to look at. It doesn’t even have to be a video, it can

be still shots that are stringed together to look like a video using free programs like Windows

Movie Maker or iMovie (See sample below).

Reason One

One of the excuses I’ve heard as to why video hasn’t caught on in CRE is ugly buildings. How

can you show a video of an empty shell or an industrial building? I don’t think this is a good

excuse to not create a video. There are plenty of ugly houses that have videos created for

them. Besides, you can focus on the surrounding area instead of showing the empty space. You

can create a decent short video with a few slides (similar to what you are already putting on your

flyer: property overview page, a few pictures, a map, your contact info; throw in some slide

transitions, and viola, you have a video.

Reason Two

Another reason why I think video hasn’t caught on: videos for homes are viewed by interested

buyers, usually while they are in their home, on their personal computer. In commercial real

estate, the video might be viewed by a commercial real estate professional while he is in a cube

or an office. If you’ve ever worked in a cube atmosphere, you know that you cannot watch video

because you will disrupt those around you. So my theory is, out of common courtesy,

commercial real estate professionals don’t create videos because they know the audience work in

cubes, offices or are always on the road.

Who knows what the real reason video hasn’t caught on in the commercial space? Commercial

professionals have some of the same tools available as residential agents; we just don’t know

how to use them yet, and CRE tends to lag behind a few years. LoopNet is now getting into the

video game with Pro Video, for only $995, you can have a custom video created.

Below is a video that I created in PhotoStory 3 (no longer available) from our old corporate

headquarters. I just walked around, took a few shots with my smartphone and added some

zooms. You will see, it is nothing spectacular and it took me less than 1 hour to build, but it is

better than a flyer.

Just think, you could have toured one less building with that client if someone would make the

leap to video.

By John Boyer, Director of Marketing for Coldwell Banker Commercial Affiliates

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