Real estate agents, brokers, and marketers – when you’re sitting down to make a real estate video with Animoto, whether it’s a property listing video, an agent testimonial, a neighborhood tour, or any other type of video, the first thing you’ll need to decide is what kind of video you’d like to create – a Slideshow Video or a Marketing Video.

If you aren’t familiar with the types of videos that can be created with each of these products, the decision can be tough. To help you out, we’ve created two popular types of real estate videos two times each – once as a slideshow video and once as a marketing video. Check them out below, along with a list of the features that were used to create each video.

Note: The Marketing Video Builder is available for Animoto Professional and Business customers.

Property Listing Videos

A video can be a great addition to a property listing, to help it stand out and really give potential buyers and renters a good look at the property. We’ve created a slideshow video and a marketing video version of this property listing video, showcasing a home in Hawaii. The videos both use the exact same photos and video clips.

Marketing Video

This marketing video was created with 12 photos, 2 video clips, and a logo, using the Standout marketing video style. The song, “A Beautiful Life (Instrumental)” by Justin James, is available in the Animoto music library.

Marketing Video Builder features used:

This video features many of the advanced customization options in our Marketing Video Builder, designed to help you create content that feels on-brand, looks professional, and stands out on social media.

• Text customization: Text customization features were used to customize font style and color. You’ll notice that the video contains a variety of different text colors (white over photos and video clips), and red titles and black subtitles on title blocks. The ability to customize color and layout per block is a feature unique to marketing videos.

• Text over video: The Marketing Video Builder also gives you the ability to put text on top of video clips. With slideshow videos, you can only use text on title and photo blocks. This video contains two video clips with text.

• Collage: Collage blocks allow you to showcase several images at once. In the example, you’ll find a 4-photo collage at 0:06 seconds and a 3-photo collage at 0:19 seconds. Showcasing several images at once cuts down on the length of your video. You’ll notice that this marketing video is 0:35 seconds long, while the slideshow version below takes 0:54 seconds to showcase the same number of images and video clips.

• Video styles: We currently offer five marketing video styles. Each has it’s own text and transition treatment. However, you are able to choose from a variety of fonts and font layouts and select your own colors, making it super easy to create a video that feels like your brand. As mentioned above, this video was created with the Standout style.

• Pre-built storyboards: This video (along with the other marketing video in this post) is actually available for you to make your own. It’s our “Property Listing” pre-built storyboard for real estate marketing. While this video wasn’t created using a pre-built storyboard (because it is one!), it does give us a good opportunity to remind you that we offer a variety of templates that you can start with to help you tell a great story. Simply drag and drop your own photos and/or video clips into the storyboard project and change the text and logo to make them yours.

Slideshow Video

And here is the slideshow video version of this property listing. This video features our Brilliance slideshow video style. Again, this video was made with all the same original photos, video clips, and text as the marketing video above.

Slideshow Video Builder features used:

A variety of features were used to create this video — some are unique to the Marketing Video Builder; others are not.

• Video styles: The Slideshow Video Builder has over 70 design-rich video styles to choose from. Styles determine the look and feel of your video and (with the exception of our three customizable styles, Frameless, Documentary, and Classic) have set colors, fonts, and animated video effects.

• Text: The text in this video was added by filling out the titles and subtitles in our slideshow text blocks, as well as captions on photo blocks. Text layout and font are set, based on your style selection. Note that slideshow videos cannot contain text on video clips.

Agent Testimonial Videos

A testimonial video is a great way to showcase awards, accolades, and feedback from buyers and sellers you’ve worked with. Here are two versions of the same video, featuring Louise Kelly-Decker of Diane Turton Realtors.

Marketing Video

This video was created with 12 photos, 1 video clip, and written testimonials from three clients, using the Blank Slate marketing video style. The song, “A Whimsical Journey (Instrumental)” by Abbas Premjee, is available in our music library.

If you want to make this video your own, you’re in luck – it’s available as a pre-built storyboard too. It’s the “Agent Testimonial” pre-built storyboard for real estate marketing.

Marketing Video Builder features used:

In addition to the text customization and collage mentioned in the property listing video above, this video features one more of our marketing video features:

• Split-screen layouts:  The Blank Slate marketing video style features the unique ability to showcase a photo or video clip vertically, next to text. In this example, the split-screen layout feature is used to share client quotes alongside images.

Slideshow Video

The slideshow version of this video was created using one of our customizable styles – Frameless.

Slideshow Video Builder features used:

• Customizable styles: Frameless, Documentary, and Classic are our customizable video styles. They allow you to make several selections to create videos that are on brand, including text style, color, and background color selection (per video, not per block).

• Text: This video, like the slideshow video above, also utilized text blocks and captions in photo blocks. It is important to note that the character limit for slideshow captions and titles is smaller than that of marketing videos, so we had to shorten some of the titles to create this version.

Did you prefer the slideshow video or marketing video versions of these videos? We’d love to hear why in the comments. Do you prefer one builder to the other when it comes to making your own own real estate videos? Let us know!