How to Prep your Property for a Real Estate Video Tour in San Jose
A stunning real estate video tour sends a signal to the market that your property is valuable and strongly worth considering. If you don’t have a video tour, leads may skip past your property during the research process. If you have a bad video tour with poor lighting and no staging, your leads may wonder if they’re watching a horror film. So how do you prep your property to ensure that your real estate video tour in San Jose is beautiful and shareworthy? Below are five tips for success on the day of the shoot.
1. Clean and Declutter
Your professional real estate videographer will be using high definition equipment that can capture dust, dirt and cobwebs. Since video shoots are harder to stage than photo shoots and often record more angles of your property, it must be spotless. Clean and buff all surfaces. Make sure windows and glass doors are sparkling and free of any dust or streaks.
Put away items that may make rooms, tables, benches and other surfaces look messy. Get rid of post-it notes, random ornaments and other miscellaneous items. If your shelves are bursting with books, put a few away. Likewise, with magazines. A few magazines on a coffee table can look stylish but not a big pile. If in doubt, lean towards a minimalist look.
If in doubt, adopt a minimalist look for your real estate video tour in San Jose, as shown by this example. It’s better to err away from the possibility of your property looking cluttered.
2. Stage Your Property
Straighten the paintings on the walls. Arrange the table décor such as lamps, vases and placemats. Make the beds. Place the toilet lids down. Line up the chairs around the dining table. Do everything possible to make each room look as appealing as possible. Your property is going online for the whole market to see, so you want to make an excellent first impression to attract prospects.
3. Turn Off Screens and Fans
As a general rule, it’s a good idea to turn off all screens including televisions and computers. Not only are they are a visual distraction, the flickering can affect the lighting of the video shoot. Fans can cause curtains and blinds to flutter, so leave them off. If there are any flickering lighting fixtures, replace them and check that all bulbs in a room are of the same wattage and type. Ensure your garage door and the remote control is working.
4. Put Away Family Photos & Seasonal Decorations
Put away family photos, trophies and memorabilia. If you’ve got seasonal decorations up, such as for Christmas or Halloween, take those down as it will automatically date your video shoot. While decorations such as plastic skeletons and fake cobwebs might be charming to members of your household, they can look tacky to outsiders. The bottom line is, you want your real estate video tour in San Jose to look as classy and elegant as possible.
Tasteful decor in spaces such as the living room can enhance the your real estate tour in San Jose.
5. Maintain Your Yard and Exteriors
This is especially important if your video tour includes drone footage. I would recommend that you mow your yard about three days before, because lawns typically look at their best a little while after they’ve been maintained. Tend to hedges and your garden. Line up pot plants, place trash cans out of the line of filming, put away hoses and gardening tools. If you have a pool, make sure the debris is cleaned from it. Before the shoot, rake away any leaves.
Your real estate video tour in San Jose is marketing tool and an investment to catch the attention of prospects. Make that investment worthwhile by making your property as attractive and beautiful as possible. While last minute checks and fixes are to be expected, you want the bulk of the clean-up and staging work to be completed well in advance of the shoot. On the day of the shoot, you don’t want your professional real estate photographer to wasting time and energy on helping to prep your property. You want them to immediately focus their efforts on capturing a video that’s a magnet for leads and enables you to sell your property quickly at your asking price.
Slava Blazer Photography has been helping home owners and realtors to sell their properties in San Jose for 12 years. We offer stunning state-of-the-art services in real estate photography, and virtual and video tours, with our customer satisfaction shown by our 170+ five star reviews on Yelp and Google. Let us help you showcase your listing today.