Customers

At any given time, Sawbuck Realty has thousands of home listings in cities including Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. The company wanted to incorporate video into its offerings to better inform consumers and help users connect in a more personal way to the homes in which they were interested.

“Not everyone who visits our site buys a house,” says Sawbuck Realty CEO Guy Wolcott. “But very few people start buying a house without doing something like viewing a video.”

Sawbuck Realty’s listings consisted only of textual data and whatever pictures individual agents decided to post. For some homes, that was as many as 30 images. Other listings offered no photos at all. Sawbuck Realty knew video was the key to encouraging more visitors to use its website as their primary home-search source.

The problem, however, was finding a way to provide always-updated video that reflected frequent changes in price and other market factors. The scale of the project was enormous.

SundaySky incorporated interactive links throughout each video by which users can jump to other listings or schedule a tour.

The availability of video on Sawbuck.com enables the company to clearly differentiate itself in a competitive market. For agents and sellers, the site offers a personalized video that showcases the home and appears next to the listing within a few hours. Even if that agent declines to post any photographs to entice buyers, Sawbuck Realty can create a video on the fly based on a vast store of artwork that accommodates as many as 40 different home styles with a selection of a dozen choices in foreground and background design. For buyers, the videos provide visual and audio data about the listings, as well as quick, individualized overviews of each neighborhood.

“Including links within the video ultimately leads to a transaction,” says Wolcott. “The video becomes a funnel to the next step in the buying process.”

ROI in real estate takes longer to measure than in other e-commerce situations. “People don’t buy a house with two clicks and a credit card,” says Wolcott. However, the addition of video to the website had several immediate and significant results. Sawbuck measured a 100 percent lift in conversion to its home-tour request page, as well as enormous conversion boosts on all its pages containing video. And because the deployment of videos is site wide, all listings reap a positive effect, not just the most popular ones.

In just the first three months of Sawbuck’s SundaySky usage, more than 442,500 videos were generated, with more than 10,000 videos generated per day on average. The company saw early success and positive SEO results, receiving more than 158,900 video views in just over two months. Since then, Sawbuck has increased its library to more than 700,000 unique videos with an average of 2.75 viewings per listing, totaling nearly 2 million views, all prompted by video offerings.

Today, the SundaySky video solution drives 5 percent of Sawbuck’s total website traffic and has appreciably increased engagement and improved user experience. More than 50 percent of viewers watch a video all the way through, increasing overall video SEO, site stickiness and efficacy. Sawbuck reports that videos have increased its reach and enabled the capture of more visitors via universal search and other paths.

“We are the first real estate company to have dynamic videos on our site, and the results for the overall business have exceeded our expectations,” says Wolcott. “We give a lot of credit to SundaySky for making the time to learn our market and how to best meet our needs.”