5-min read
You spend a lot of time on your phone. In fact, people spend an average of 3 hours and 15 minutes per day on their phones. With your phone always near you, whether that be in your pocket or car at the job site, do you know how to use it to your advantage? In this article, you’ll learn simple tips and tricks to film home tour videos with your phone. Continue reading about filming home tour videos with your iPhone…
Table of Contents
The very first step you need to complete is preparing your model home for the video shoot. This is more than just cleaning the countertops and sweeping the floors. Prepping your home for a video tour requires paying attention to the small details and enhancing the natural lighting of the house.
Have you ever had to delete media files on your phone to open up more storage space? If you have a limited storage plan for your devices, then you may have to do this more than once. Before you film tours of your homes, be sure you have enough storage and space to do so. The last thing you want it to start your video and run out of space to save the whole file.
Go to Settings > General > [Device] Storage. Here, you might see a list of recommendations for optimizing your storage, followed by apps and the amount of storage each one uses. If you don’t want to delete any images, consider disabling a few apps that use the most storage. Once you have the home prepared and enough storage, it’s time to film.
Before you hit the record button, be sure all of the lights in the home are on and the blinds/curtains are pulled open for more natural light. When you record the virtual tour, walk slowly, and use 5-10 second clips, recording each one individually. If one of the short clips doesn’t turn out right, delete it and start that clip over. This can save you a lot of time in the long run.
Repeat this process in all rooms, including the foyer and outdoor living areas. While recording, you can either explain the details of the home such as talking about the finishes and features or you can just add music later to the video instead.
If you follow all of the video recording tips above, then you’ll have great content to edit. The better the content, the easier it is to make it look appealing to your buyers in the editing phase. When it’s time to edit, be sure to make it on-brand to your home builder/developer company. This means including intro and exit screens that include your logo and a call to action (CTA).
You can edit your videos with your iPhone directly or you can use a third-party application like Adobe Premiere. For truly professional videos. Adobe Premiere is a timeline-based video editing software application that offers a wealth of capabilities. If you decide to use your phone directly, you can use the iMovie app instead and still get great results.
By using either Adobe Premiere or iMovie, start combining your clips. When using iMovie, make sure you select the videos in the order you want them to appear. When using Premier, make sure the order of clips represents the natural way a potential homebuyer would walk through the home so the tour makes senses and the flow smoothly on the tour.
I recommend adding upbeat music and at least your website or phone number to your exit screen. You need some form of CTA to keep track of the video success. You can create a Bitly link to use in the video exit screen or even a tracking phone number. This will help you determine ROI from your videos.
Here is a recent clip of one of my client’s for you to see as an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaq2azK1Yj8
I included drone footage I had shot by a professional drone operator to offer a great perspective of the overall community and the proximity to the water.
If your home video was a marketing success, then repeat the process. As a home builder or developer, you build new homes or community projects all of the time. Before each sale, use these steps to film a quick video tour of your finished product. After all, more than half of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best results.
These five steps will not only strengthen your marketing strategy, but also your homebuilder or developer brand. Use your iPhone to create these videos as it’s quite easy to develop this impactful, unique video content of your homes.
Do you have any questions about how to film a home video tour on your iPhone? Let me know by commenting below.
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About Terry Zelen
Creative Director | Consultant | Author | President of Zelen Communications
Terry Zelen is a seasoned Creative Director with more than 35 years of experience in Home Builder advertising and marketing.
He is the founder of The Punch List, which is an online blog to help inform home builders and developers on strategic marketing insights to fuel their firm.
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