Video can be time-consuming and expensive, but many of the same benefits that agents and sellers get from multimedia investments are also a boon to the larger brand.

That was one of the reasons @properties decided to invest in an in-house video program back in 2016. Today the company has four staffers and two contractors whose work is dedicated to shooting, editing and optimizing video projects. While they do some corporate work for the larger @properties brand, the bulk of what they do is listing videos. The team takes an average of five days from start to finish to create one-minute videos that showcase properties on the market.

While agents are required to pay a nominal fee to get listing videos from the in-house team, Natasha Patla, @properties’ vice president of marketing, noted that the charge is about a third of what brokers would pay for such services on the open market. “For us, it is an investment,” she said. “We were really looking for how we could showcase our listings in the best way.”

The program was conceived as a way to get ahead of the growing need for video in the world of property marketing and help agents move a task that isn’t exactly a specialty for most onto a professional’s plate. “For our agents, they do see it as a valuable resource,” Patla said. “[Video] is not something they have a lot of knowledge on.”

While in-house video can be a useful recruiting tool, it’s also part of a larger strategy for @properties and brings particular benefits to the brokerage that aren’t possible with other media. Not only does the system allow @properties to maintain a quality control of sorts — the company will reject raw footage that’s shot poorly, for example — but also having more video on more properties allows @properties listings to rank higher online. “We see from Zillow that they’re weighting properties differently with video. It adds to the ranking,” Patla said. “Also, all the social sites are putting an emphasis on video, so we do see more engagement with those” listings that have video.