Taking advantage of Snapchat and its biggest Snap-Stars, Zillow is seeking out the Millennial market with new, reality-TV-like real estate listings via YouTube. One of the more interesting real estate trends for 2016, Zillow attempts to make home ownership look cool to a generation who’s been dragging their feet on entering the market.
Welcome to a strange marketing technique
Hosted by “A Cereal Production” founder Harris Markowitz, whose content is geared toward the social media genre, the “Welcome to Snaphouse” video introduces the concept with copious Malibu Snap-House home footage pre-intro. The premise: “Zillow wanted to know what would happen if five of the biggest and best creators on Snapchat were put together in a crazy awesome house for 24 hours with one mission: To create.”
Cut – and cut – and cut
In the first 60 seconds, the video is broken up by 10 cuts. House-specific footage is silent with subtitles, a stark contrast to the overly animated voices of Snap-Stars through the nearly 5-minute video. Probably fine for socially-inclined Gen-Y and Z, but annoyingly choppy for X-ers and Boomers, who generally don’t get the concept.
Home listing? Or “reality” show?
Following the intro and copious silent home footage, Snap-Stars discuss their idea of a dream home, favorite rooms… and lots of other extraneous information. If Snapchat and socially-addicted, over-sharing individuals didn’t annoy you before, they will now.
To be continued…
Follow-up videos in the SnapHouse are shorter, approximately 1-minute clips of SnapStars being creative, telling their professional selfie-taking stories, and filming it within the house. With a paltry 14,000 views and videos that don’t rank in Google searches, it remains to be seen if this will be one of the real estate trends for 2016 that sticks around.
What real estate trends for 2016 are here to stay? Find out – on Properties Online today.