Christian Sterner of WellcomeMat speaks with Ubertor

I asked Christian of WellcomeMat to answer a few questions about his video platform product. Take a moment to learn more about WellcomeMat and how they differ from YouTube.

Ubertor: In your opinion, why is video so great?

WellcomeMat: I’m going to switch your question up a bit and just list off the reasons why I quit a six figure job, made $0 in the last 15 months, spent my life savings, work seven days a week and strained my marriage to make WellcomeMat.com happen:

1) Video saves everyone (buyers, renters, and sellers) a ton of time. Buyers are the most obvious winners in the video equation. Simply put, they don’t have to visit places in person unless they know that they might make a move. Buyers’ agents save this time too! The sellers and listing agents in the video equation deal with less “window shoppers” in person.

2) Real estate professionals that use video as a listing tool make more money. Homes with video tours attached stand out hugely amongst photo and text-based listings. Although there are not many sites able to tell how much more traffic video-based listings get, the evidence is mounting in video’s favor. It is a huge magnetic pull! Add to that the fact that videos will find their way to page one of an organic Google search (because of Google Universal Search), usually within the first week of being posted, and now we’re talking! Lastly, we are hearing time and time again how powerful a good video is when trying to win a listing over competing agents/brokers. I have yet to meet a listing agent that has used video and stopped.

3) Video is the closest thing to a real walk through that you can get online. There are many real estate marketers that view video’s realness as a scary thing. But, their assumption is a fluffed property online will yield more sales. Not true! Matching the physical walk through, and the experience homeowners might have living in a particular neighborhood should be the goal of video.

4) It is a “green” technology, helping to us to use less fuel and be less wasteful.

We often hear about how video is more difficult than using photos, or virtual tours, and more expensive. Completely true! So what? Harvard is more difficult and expensive than a community college, but attending will yield better results (disclaimer: I am a mere University of Colorado at Boulder grad). What our team always finds in terms of adversity to video is a cost analysis: video verses photos, or video verses virtual tours. These discussions are, for the most part, worthless. Use everything you can to win listings and make more money! Photos rock too. And, there are many video producers that have figured out ways to charge less and do more volume. The average cost of video has decreased massively since WellcomeMat first went live (June 2006). Without question, competition is working its magic within the production side of real estate video.

Ubertor: How are people to best use WellcomeMat’s system and technologies?

WellcomeMat: I would start by simply stating dive in! Our team supports our users better than any tech company I can think of. And, we have about 1000 video producers ready to help you get going as well. We are always amazed at how much WellcomeMat video producers want to help people understand how to do it themselves. Truth told, people that want to sell/rent a lot of properties cannot spend their time shooting their videos. They know this, but they also know that many people want to try video themselves.

In general, think of WellcomeMat.com as a one stop shop to: get professionally produced videos (or upload your own), create the best quality video experience for your viewers, and get your videos into every spot desired on the web (blogs, listings landing pages, Craigslist etc.). To us, it’s all about making stars out of those using video well, making sure our members have fun with video, and enriching our members’ sites/web pages.

Ubertor: What makes WellcomeMat better than YouTube?

WellcomeMat: Nobody is “better” than YouTube! For what YouTube does, they are the best. That site is raw volume and SEO. There aren’t many smart people questioning the amount of traffic videos get on YouTube; and, now that Google owns them, videos posted on YouTube show up quickly within organic search results. What WellcomeMat does better than anyone is a) helps people gather high-quality content through support and our videographer directory, b) provides the highest quality playback (clarity, chaptering for clickable scenes etc), and c) helps people to get their content into the right contexts. Context is a big deal right now. People are posting their videos to a bunch of different sites that provide zero relevance to a real estate search. If the intention is to show up within search engines, posting videos to the generalist video sites makes sense. If you want to use quality video where it should be used (your site(s) and your blog), WellcomeMat is where you do all of this.