BienesRaicesVideo.com To Participate In FIABCI Congress of the Americas In Panama

Our Spanish language real estate video service provider, http://bienesraicesvideo.com (means “real estate video”), will have a booth at the FIABCI Congress of the Americas in the Republic of Panama from 30 October through 3 November.  We are also one of the sponsors of the event.

The FIABCI Congress is being hosted by the Panama Chapter of FIABCI and will have large participation from real estate organizations and luminaries from throughout the Americas. Representatives from various FIABCI chapters in Central and South America as well as Europe and the U.S. will be plentiful. We will announce several new Latin American real estate video partnerships at the event and also sponsor/host a separate cocktail party. More information about the event is available at http://fiabcipanama.com.  There are various videos about the upcoming event hosted on that site – FIABCI Panama is a real estate video partner with BienesRaicesVideo.com

If you will be attending the FIABCI Congress in Panama, please consider stopping by our booth and otherwise getting in contact with us. We have representatives that speak both English and Spanish and I will personally attend as well.

One of Panama’s Top Real Estate Agencies Partners With BienesRaicesVideo.com

Inversiones Natasha, one of the top real estate agencies in the Republic of Panama has partnered with Vidlisting.com’s spanish language real estate video sister site, bienesraicesvideo.com, to provide rich media video content on their website.  This agency has a long history of providing international real estate buyers the best possible services in Spanish and English.  Inversiones Natasha has been investing in video content to post on BienesRaicesVideo.com for properties in Panama for some time now but they’ll now be able to syndicate and manage that content under their own domain name.

The Inversiones Natasha website will relaunch at the end of October complete with an integrated online property video capability provided by BienesRaicesVideo.com.  We are thrilled to be a part of the video marketing efforts for this prestigious real estate agency in Panama.

Expo Camera 2007 – Panama

We are participating in Expo Camera 2007 at the Atlapa Convention Center in Panama City, Panama.  This is the first show supported from our new local office in Panama City. We’ll be at stand 26/27 (in the ACOBIR area) and, if you happen to be in the area, there is a show special for our real estate video services.

We are also using the stand to highlight real estate videos to audiences offline as well as online.  We plan on improving the scale/scope of this transition of online real estate video to offline audiences as we collect more data and feedback from our offline audience. You can see what we are doing over at http://vidlisting.com in English or http://bienesraicesvideo.com in Spanish.

ACOBIR Implements BienesRaicesVideo.com Real Estate Video Infrastructure For Panama

We are pleased to announce that ACOBIR (the Panama Association of Real Estate Agents and Promoters)  is the first announced beta partner to implement the BienesRaicesVideo.com real estate video infrastructure.  The implementation brings a significant real estate video capability to the ACOBIR website without any of the traditional bandwidth or management problems.

The implementation consists of three elements:

– A self updating real estate video bar on the home page of http://acobir.com.  Even though the site is in spanish, you’ll see the bar near the bottom of the home page. This element retains the look and feel of the overall page, is entirely geolocated without the need for Google maps, and is implemented with one line of HTML code. All video listings are managed by the bienesraicesvideo.com servers.  ACOBIR will be able to use their system of listing IDs.  UPDATED: We know that we have some work to do on this bar tomorrow with Firefox and likely Safari.  Fixed on both – tested on 5 browsers.

– A full size real estate video player page in multiple languages that retains the overall look and feel of the ACOBIR website.  Again, the visible content of the entire page is implemented with a single line of HTML code. You’ll see this page when you click on the video bar on the ACOBIR home page.  All content and bandwidth for the videos is provided by bienesraicesvideo.com servers.

– A video bar for the listing detail page: This functionality is not yet fully implemented due to some requirements on ACOBIR’s part.  But each listing will have the range of languages in which a given video is available.  This also is a one line implementation of HTML code that can easily be dynamically generated. The bar will look like the following on each detail page that has videos available: (nothing will appear on listings without videos)

ACOBIR members will be able to film properties themselves or contact the bienesraicesvideo.com office in Panama City for complete video services.  Congratulations to ACOBIR for implementing a fully functional video infrastructure that requires minimal administration and is managed externally while providing benefits to ACOBIR members and visitors to the ACOBIR web domain.  We have a number of other partner sites as we can now literally extend a subset of our videos to other websites with just a single line of HTML code.

Beta Real Estate Video Widget For Use On WordPress.com Blogs

We’ve just added a very simple implementation of a real estate video widget specifically for wordpress.com blogs. It’s a tiny part of the changes that we will be bringing to the market in coming weeks. We’ve put a sample of this video widget over on the right hand sidebar of our full time blog at https://forsalebylocals.wordpress.com/. We also have an example of the Spanish language widget on our Spanish language blog at http://casacomprar.wordpress.com. 

You can find the code to paste here: http://activerain.com/blogsview/136003/Cut-and-Paste-Code

This particular widget displays the latest 3 real estate property videos from Panama. As we add more videos next week, the newest videos will automagically display. Note that US REALTORS can get referral fees under a new program between ACOBIR (the Panama real estate association) and the US National Association of REALTORS (NAR).

We can also provide the same type of video widget that is filtered by language for a particular REALTOR, broker, agency, local real estate association, or even geolocated down to a neighborhood level. The video can even use our own infrastructure and be played within your own domain using a very simple cut and paste approach.

Although this particular real estate video widget will work on other types of sites, it is specifically designed to work within the technical limitations of wordpress.com blogs. We will have a more feature filled video widget for other sites in the coming weeks.

Real Estate Video Office In Panama Now Open

We’ve opened our real estate video office in the El Cangrejo area of Panama now.  We’ve had a few small logistics and administrative difficulties that will be remedied in the coming week.  Things like having the electricity connected can be important to long term sustained business operations  😛  We are getting along for the moment although it took a while to find an internet cafe that didnt block access to ports used our database.  If you are waiting for a call from me, now you know why. Feel free to call me on my Panama cell at Country code 507 and the number 6436-1591.  I am currently on US central time.

We’ve done quite a bit of local filming already and have more real estate property videos for ACOBIR members to film next week. 

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….

Real Estate Video Interview From Panama With Ana Patricia de la Guardia, Banco General

We recently sat down for a real estate video interview with Ana Patricia de la Guardia, who works in the Retail and Mortgage Banking Division of Banco General in Panama. She was a wonderful interviewee, speaks English very well, and covered a number of valuable topics related to foreigners being able to qualify for mortgage loans in Panama. As a interesting side note, Banco General has an international credit rating higher than the country of Panama itself.

Click To Watch Ana Patricia’s Video Interview In English

In this seven minute English language real estate video interview, Ana Patricia discusses a wide range of topics including the paperwork requirements and process for residential and commercial mortgages.  She also touches upon the upcoming merger of Banco General with Banco Continental which will make the bank the largest in Panama. We also have a video interview in Spanish with Ricardo Porcell from the same division within Banco General.

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….

Logistics Coming Together For Our Real Estate Video Office In Panama

We’ve found office space, have bilingual employee candidates identified, and are chugging along with getting our real estate video office in Panama opened.  June sounds like a long way away but we have another conference to attend in Europe between now and office launch.  It seems as if we just launched an office in South America.  😛

We do have a local Panama phone number for the company (507-6-436-1591) and have already filmed a bunch of properties in the first few days of our agreement with ACOBIR (the Panamanian Real Estate Association).  We have 3 more properties to film before we head back to South America on Sunday to prepare for our European adventure.   The real estate property videos from Central America will really start in earnest once our office opens.