Brent Bastin: video is a winner

Brent Bastin

Riding a kid's bike, juggling fruit and roasting marshmallows - I pushed the boat out more than most real estate agents - making a speciality of hamming it up in quirky promotional videos.

Using innovative marketing strategies have proven success for me since I started in 2014 - now as a business owner, international speaker, and mentor, I some-what feel qualified to write this column and wanted to share with you everything I have learned, while keeping you abreast of an ever-changing market.

I will bring you real estate tips, market commentary, and some off-topic ranting occasionally thrown in for good measure.

To start I thought I would introduce myself. After spending six years representing New Zealand in kayaking around the world and completing my Bachelor of Commerce, I decided to shift my focus and energy into a career in real estate.

From the get go I realised the emergence of social networking sites such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube has changed the playing field; so I decided to utilise my knowledge and raise the bar in producing creative ways to market homes for sale.

In true real estate agent fashion it would be easy to ramble more on about myself but my motivation is because I enjoy sharing knowledge that might help someone.

So, for my first column I wanted to share my knowledge about video as a tool to telling your property story.

As we all know videos of emotionally engaging and informative content are exploding around the world. Who doesn't know Grumpy Cat? Video and marketing go hand in hand.

In the last year, I think we produced 150 odd videos. So those videos go onto Facebook, and for $50 per video, we can reach up to 20, 30, 40,000 people a week. I look at a video as a trailer to the property.

So, from my point of view, it's about having trigger points with your clients, so with your buyer, with your customer, whoever it is, you want them to find some form of trigger point to come and see the property.

So, if you look at a movie, for example, you don't usually go to a movie now without watching the trailer. So I now think of it as a trailer to the property.

So one, it's a benefit to the vendor. Two, it's a benefit for us, because once again, it breaks through that barrier of trust where you're not the dodgy agent trying to sell them the house anymore, but you're actually the really nice guy, or the idiot that was on the scooter. Or you were nice to the kid, or something like that, so it breaks that barrier down of the salesperson, and you become the trusted adviser, which is really important, obviously, when it comes to the transactional side of it.

The key is staying relevant and keeping things fresh, every week I am still thinking of new and innovative ways to produce new content. Keep up or get left behind!

- Brent Bastin is a successful real estate salesperson, mentor, international speaker and business owner at Tremains Real Estate Tauranga. Find Brent via Instagram (@brentbastinrealestate) or Facebook (brentbastinrealestate).