Taking Your Real Estate Videos and Virtual Home Tours to the Next Level

Agent Resources | Jan 31, 2012

• Tweet
• Email

If a real estate video or virtual home tour is the next best thing to an in-person showing of a home, what’s the best way for a real estate agent to make that viewing experience one that will encourage a potential buyer to take the next step? Photo galleries and video tours have made it easier for buyers (especially out-of-town ones) to peruse a high volume of homes and properties in a short period of time.  But it’s also made it that much tougher for Realtors to get an audience with their potential customers – to say nothing of the time buyers exhaust trying to wade through the good, bad, and ugly of homes for sale on the Internet.

Bill Koepnick is an EMMY-awarding winning sound editor from Los Angeles who retired to the Upstate six years ago and now produces high-quality real estate videos. He is able to offer unique insight into this creative and highly technical process.

“I try to make the video move through the house the way a Realtor would show it and offer comments about the salient points of each room,” Koepnick offers. “I start by learning what the seller wants to highlight, and then I make sure to get good footage of that and everything else I will need to build the whole tour.”

That means interior and exterior shots at different times of the day, which ensures good lighting without the added cost (or overly bright effect) of artificially lighting each room during shooting. A high-quality camera and expert editing are also key to creating a polished, finished product. He shoots with a Sony EX1 in HDCAM-EX, which offers a widescreen (16:9) HD format, then he edits on a Mac Pro running Final Cut Pro, and he records and edits voiceover in Logic Pro. He selects and edits music that underscores the narration, and he crafts a stereo mix of the soundtrack so that is in sync with the movement of the pictures. His music comes primarily from the SonicFire Pro music library, with cuts edited to picture in the SonicFire application and then imported (along with the voiceover) into his Final Cut Pro program.

The script that accompanies a real estate video is just as important as the images themselves, and Koepnick makes sure the tour is organized in a logical and fluent room-to-room order, just as it would be if it were being shown in person.

“I write the narration script, describing what the viewer is seeing, and the script goes out to the Realtor and/or client for approval,” he explains. Graphics and Realtor’s logo are incorporated, as well, and clients are able to approve the final, edited video before it is reformatted from HD to DVD format and sent off for duplication – complete with his custom-designed label graphics.

The process is detail-oriented and highly involved, indeed. Shooting alone takes between four and six hours, and usually requires two to three visits to the home during various times of the day. Editing takes roughly another six hours, and the narration script writing, recording, and editing requires another two hours. Final assembly and audio mixing takes another two hours, plus DVD production and uploading. His billable rate is $50/hour, and all non-location work is done out of a small studio he built in his home.

“Most of my work history has involved designing and working with sound,” says Koepnick, who retired to South Carolina in 2006. His sound effects business, ZoundFX led him to build a post-production sound studio called Advantage Audio in Burbank with an engineering partner in 1990. During that time, he won three EMMYs for sound design, two EMMYs for sound mixing, and three Golden Reel awards from the Motion Picture Sound Editors Guild for sound editing.

Retirement to the Southeast has simply opened the door to more opportunities. “Like most retirees, I still need to keep busy,” says Koepnick who also works as a sound technician and second camera operator for the Seneca-based video production company, GBA Productions. “In addition to recording music and playing live with a local band, I take on video projects I find interesting.”

What’s interesting and captivating to Koepnick is infinitely appealing to homebuyers, and it is at the disposal of listing agents in the Lake Keowee area. Check out Koepnick’s Lake Keowee real estate video below for a glimpse into how exceptional a Premier home can look, even if an in-person visit is not an option.