Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
YouTube influencers are shining a spotlight on luxury real estate, with videos that offer a closer look at some of the mansions of the ultra wealthy.
This new trend for focusing on high-end properties has improved YouTube’s status as an “important marketing channel for even the most privacy-obsessed home seller”, the Wall Street Journal reported. All the more so in the last year, as the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that far fewer people are able to tour homes in person.
YouTuber Enes Yilmazer (pictured), who boasts more than 820,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel, posts tours of some of the most expensive homes in the U.S., ranging from waterfront mansions on Lake Tahoe in Nevada to penthouses on New York’s “Billionaires Row”. His videos typically gain millions of views and generate thousands of comments.
The rise in high-end real estate on YouTube has even inspired some agents to work with social media influencers to market their listings. Real estate pro Rochelle Maize told the Journal she approached a number of TikTok influencers to generate more attention for a $5.3 million listed home in Santa Monica, California. Last month, she created an online form that was sent to TikTok influencers that they could use to apply to spend two hours filming inside the home. They were granted access to a number of the home’s “viral-worthy vignettes,” including its two-story pool slide, music room, recording studio, arts and crafts room, and game room.
Another popular YouTuber, Erik Conover, who has more than 1.5 million subscribers, told the Journal that his videos can definitely help to attract prospective buyers for the homes he features on his channel.
Still, not everyone believes that social media is the way to go when trying to market higher-end properties. That the owners may have privacy concerns is obvious enough. But the buyers may also be concerned about having their future home so publicly exposed.
“A lot of sellers at a very high level want to maintain some semblance of privacy,” said Alexander Ali, founder of the Society Group, a nationwide real estate public relations firm. “Our buyers would not necessarily want everyone seeing their bedrooms and the overall layout of the home from a security perspective.”
