Rolling Out Online Real Estate Video Services In Panama, the U.S, And Likely Spain

The reach of the ForSaleByLocals real estate video network is expanding. 

We have been investing heavily in our supporting infrastructure and will roll out some changes that will let us begin dedicated real estate video operations in Panama, Costa Rica, and the rest of Central America next week. We will also begin working in some areas of the U.S. like Florida by the end of the month, and likely open a dedicated office in Spain within two months.

As always, our property videos will be available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.  However, we are planning to expand our narration capability to include French and likely at least one other language in conjunction with opening a real estate video office in Spain.  This expansion in language capability is in response to various customer requests and to continue to increase our international reach.

Busy days ahead….

Next Stop: Profitability In The Real Estate Video Business

 Soooooo  Close…

I’ve had the blog post in draft for several months now – we’ve been frustratingly close but not yet at net profitability. We’ll likely *just* miss again this month primarily due to travel costs to Europe at the end of the month as well as costs associated with spinning up our office in Central America that will serve Panama and Costa Rica. We also have some new narration and editing hires in Bolivia to bring on in the next week in order to process the increased volume of incoming real estate videos. In short, May isn’t going to be the month.

Profitability Within A Month

That said, I’ll go out on a limb and predict that our real estate video operation will likely be profitable for the month of June (and July as well).  This is based on new signed contracts for licensed video narration in South America, individual property videos reserved for June, and some reasonable percentage of sales in our foreseeable sales pipeline actually closing within the next two months.  For the record, I’m not including any inbound revenue from anticipated new business from Europe, online advertising, sponsorship, real estate video training, or any other secondary income not directly based on providing co-branded or private label real estate video services directly to customers but I am including the costs of such activities in order to calculate net profitability.

It Is Still Early In This Business Space

Some are already anointing their pre-determined winners and also-rans in the real estate video business based on flash players (of all things).  There are many excellent companies on that list but I’d respond that there is still a loooong way to go and many adoption hurdles left in the fledgling business space of real estate video. At some point, the flash player might become a key differentiator but, at this point, it is hardly the critical piece of the business issue at hand – if it was, then our real estate video network wouldn’t be getting nearly 60-70,000 monthly video views and the most popular embedded players like YouTube would be getting far more traffic than they actually are.  

Here is the reality: we’ll release our embeddable video player shortly and our real estate traffic will see some increase from where it currently is. However, this will translate into little or no direct incremental revenue until the market matures which is still a year or more off.  Additionally, in the coming months, you’ll see a growing number of agreements announced in the real estate video space but remember that there is a big difference between announcing agreements with known organizations and converting those agreements to a non-trivial amount of cash in the short term. So, what is the better indicator of success in an immature real estate video market – having a relatively commoditized flash player or having people actually watch property videos, brokers selling properties as a result, and achieving corporate  profitability?   If nothing else, profitability from operations is a established indicator of doing *something* right and will ultimately be another step in gaining respectability.

Back To South America

I’ll be back in our offices in South America on Monday.  We have more properties to film today and I fly out on Sunday so likely no more blog posts until then….

Real Estate Video Interview From Costa Rica With Leyden Briceño, BB Law Associates

We recently sat down with Leyden Briceño of BB Law Associates to talk about the legal aspects of buying real estate in Costa Rica.  Leyden has her office and law practice just outside of the town of Tamarindo in the booming province of Guanacaste, Costa Rica.

Click To Watch Leyden’s Video Interview In English

Leyden is an avid real estate investor, fully bilingual in English/Spanish, and regarded to be a top notch expert on real estate law in Costa Rica. She talked to us about the legal process for buying properties but also some of the “gotchas” that potential investors should watch out for regardless of their experience level.  Leyden also discusses her views on the current real estate market in Guanacaste.  She proved to be a very interesting interview in both English and Spanish. You can see her Spanish language interview here.

New Real Estate Video Interviews Posted

We posted a number of new real estate video interviews this morning in English and Spanish over at http://vidlisting.com/interviews.asp and http://bienesraicesvideo.com. I have a few more to review and more will be posted on Saturday. I’ll get summaries posted as quickly as possible.

The real estate video interviews posted include an interesting real estate video interview with an English speaking real estate lawyer in Costa Rica (English and Spanish posted), the president of Coldwell Banker in Panama (spanish version posted and english version to be posted on Saturday), and the great folks over at the Gran Pacifica development in Nicaragua (spanish version posted and English version to be posted on Saturday).  We also have an excellent interview that will cover financing in Panama with executives at the largest bank in Panama, Banco General coming soon.  Enjoy!

Real Estate Video Interview From Costa Rica With Bob Lent of Lent Eckhart Properties

We recently sat down with Bob Lent at his beautiful ocean view home just outside of Tamarindo, Costa Rica.  Bob is an experienced international real estate developer who strives to know his customers and provide them their dream properties.

Click To Watch Bob’s Video Interview In English

In this 9 minute English language real estate video interview, Bob talks about his company,  his craft, and shares his views on the real estate market in Costa Rica. Bob has one of the larger real estate companies in the Tamarindo (you’ll see his listings *everywhere* in the area) yet still took the time to meet with us early on a very bright, sunny Sunday morning at her residence. That should give a clue as to the level of service that his company provides…

Travel And More Travel

We are sending a video team back to Central America beginning tomorrow and lasting several weeks. They’ll be there for more real estate video interviews and to make videos of development projects. We may even film some properties for our TV program.  The plan is to have the video team not only revisit Panama and Costa Rica, but also head up to Cancun, Mexico. 

We hope to have at least one world class video interview surprise for you this trip.

We are heading to Cancun for a specific business meeting but since we’ll be in the area, we’d like to do some real estate video interviews while there. If you are or know someone who is a real estate professional, developer, or interesting service provider in or around the area of Cancun, Mexico and you’d be interested in a real estate video interview with us, please contact me at tony@forsalebylocals.com. There is no cost and interviews can be just as easily done in English and/or Spanish.

100,000 Real Estate Videos Watched In Just Over Three Months

We just passed 100,000 real estate videos watched on our site today.  As of this post the update to this post, we have 100,053 100,193.  Given the numbers that we’ve discerned about other sites, we aren’t at the top of the heap but we sure are burning right along for where we are in site development.  Additionally, the recent competition springing up in the real estate video space tells me that others think that there may be a business to build around the technology. Validation of the business opportunity is always a good thing.

I’m very proud of the entire forsalebylocals and casacomprar teams for making this important milestone.  The interesting part is that the vast majority of the interviews and property videos that have been posted to this point are from Santa Cruz, Bolivia and Brazil.  It will be interesting to see the speed to which we add 100,000 more views once we have all 30 hours of real estate video interviews from Costa Rica, Panama, and Nicaragua posted on http://forsalebylocals.com and http://vidlisting.com

The three video sites (http://vidlisting.com in English, http://bienesraicesvideo.com in Spanish and http://imoveisvideo.com in Portguese) have been our recent focus.  Now, we are turning our attention back to our three principal listing sites (http://forsalebylocals.com in English, http://casacomprar.com in Spanish and http://repousos.com in Portuguese) as well as the corresponding country specific sites.

We have done so much work over the past few months and have so many new things coming up.  We are a small team and this has been hectic but fun and, every day, we receive emails saying that you guys, our audience, think that it is definitely worth the effort. Thanks again for sharing the ride with us.

Tony

Thoughts About Our Stop in Guanacaste, Costa Rica

Guanacaste is about 4 hours by car from San Jose. The roads are decent for the four hours although there is a 20-30 minute portion that is unpaved – supposedly they are preparing for paving that road within the next 2 months.  The beaches here are of the white sand variety…nice casual environment with lots of friendly people in the area.

The next time that we travel to this area, we’ll take the more direct flight into the international airport at Liberia, Costa Rica which is only 30-45 minutes away from most of the prime beaches here.  We only had limited time here but this is definitely an area to which we want to return.

We stayed in the Flamingo Beach Resort which is a very nice hotel right on Flamingo Beach.  They have a reasonable price for a beachfront hotel, a more mature clientele, and lovely amenities such as their pool.  They also have the best connectivity that we have had since landing in Central America.  Faaaaaast 100Mbps connection…   Flamingo is ideal for those that want a bit of isolation and a quiet vacation while still keeping to touch via internet and cable TV.  As nice as the hotel is here in Flamingo, we’ll likely try staying at a different hotel in Tamarindo next time only because there is a bit livelier and diverse crowd there.  I like the nightlife, I like to boogie  (grin)……

On the work side, there are real estate projects being built everywhere here. There seems to be more activity in this area of Costa Rica than any other.  One interviewee told us that Tamarindo had only 600 people three years ago – now there are thousands of people with a growing tourist population with huge hotel projects going in soon.  However, we didnt get the amount of real estate video interviews here that we hoped. This isn’t due to a lack of real estate services, projects, or professionals at all – it was due to the last minute nature of this trip and the fact that we arrived over a weekend. Our fault.  Be assured that the real estate interviews that we did get are of high quality and interest. 

We want to return to this area soon to get more interviews. If you are involved in real estate in the Guanacaste area and want to get on our video interview schedule during our return trip, just email me at tony@forsalebylocals.com.

Have any experiences in Guanacaste that you’d like to share?

New Real Estate Video Interviews From Panama And Nicaragua

We’ve posted our first real estate video interview from Panama and should have several from Nicaragua posted today.  We have almost 15 hours of interviews to process over the next week or so.

As a side note, I do not often refer to interviews in Spanish but we had one of the most informative interviews to date with José A. Batista G. who is the Director General of Urban Development for the Ministry of Housing for the Government of Panama.  Basically, he is the government official responsible for all of the planning associated with development projects in Panama. He walked us through many of the development issues and also discusses how to know if projects being marketed have been approved by his agency.  The interview is so informative that we have decided to subtitle this particular interview.  The spanish version is here but given the workload of new interviews, we’ll have to wait a week or so for the english subtitled version. 

Clearly, we are very excited about the quality and quantity of recent interviews.  We are currently in Guanacaste, Costa Rica where a large percentage of the foreign investment is happening in Costa Rica.  On 13 February, we will be back in Nicaragua for the Central American Congress of Real Estate Agents.  We hope to get interviews from all over Central America as well as with the representatives of the National Association of REALTORS (NAR).

Off to more interviews…

Real Estate Video Interview From Costa Rica with Henry Hirsch, Blue White Properties

Henry Hirsh is an Australian living in Costa Rica and he has two companies associated with the Costa Rican real estate market.

Click to See The Video Interview With Henry

One helps real estate developers to completely manage their projects and the other one is Blue White Properties which is a real estate company that sell those projects as well as other properties.  In this real estate video interview Henry tell us about the interesting niche that he occupies and the types of projects he works with. He said that he works with the art of feng shui, trying to be sensitive with the nature and respecting the biodiversity of the existing environment. One other thing that Henry mentioned was that he encourages natural elements for the construction.

He is an expert in developing projects in the tropics so Costa Rica is a good place for him to work. One of his projects is in Guanacaste which has 189 villages. The style he used in this project is Japanese and Indonesian style..  I think Henry’s interview is a good option for those people who want to know more about how properties are developed which are in harmony with the nature and for developers that want to create unique resorts, hotel or properties for vacation. 

Gina Villagomez

gina@casacomprar.com

Telf. Bolivia: (591) 3 3416064

Telf. Centroamérica: (52) 5511669265

EEUU y Canadá: (1) 3603621032