Brent Bastin doing his thing - making wacky real estate promo videos.
Brent Bastin doing his thing - making wacky real estate promo videos.
Riding a kid's bike, juggling fruit and roasting marshmallows - Tauranga's Brent Bastin pushes the boat out more than most real estate agents - making a speciality of hamming it up in quirky promotional videos.
Hugging pet rabbits and sweeping drone shots are all part of this new breed of YouTube property selling that Bastin uses to sell homes in the booming Bay of Plenty market.
Bastin does more than planting an open home banner in the grass verge - he plants kale, does a 'snow angel' on a bed and generally acts up to help 'build emotion' around the property.
The First National agent said he makes the videos as a "trailer" to the property.
"We're finding that with so many out-of-town buyers, the more information you can give the better it is," Bastin said. "It's a bit of fun making them and it builds a little bit of emotion around the property, it builds almost a highlight of what the property is like."
Auckland's red-hot property market has spread out to the regions with Tauranga and the Bay of Plenty becoming home to many Aucklanders.
Although I am sometimes a little bit of a dork or doing some funny things, it creates a good emotion with the property as well.
According to QV's latest report home values in Tauranga have been soaring, increasing more than 28 per cent in just a year.
In the last three months alone, values in the city have increased 7 per cent. The average value in the city is now $633,638.
Bastin said the videos had helped with the sale of properties.
"Although I am sometimes a little bit of a dork or doing some funny things, it creates a good emotion with the property as well.
"It creates a really good and happy feeling about the property because you can see I am enjoying the property."
I said 'do you mind if I use the bunny?' and they said 'go for it'.
The videos usually take an hour to film and are shot and edited by professional production company Marshall Masters.
"They have taken off in the fact that vendors now want them on each of their properties," he said. "It's very rarely that I have a property where the vendor doesn't say 'oh you're going to do a video?'."
While he can't claim the idea as entirely his own, 26-year-old Bastin said he followed the lead of a couple of Australian agents doing something similar.
Juggling lemons
"The videos gives people more information about the property and create an emotion and good feeling around it. When they turn up it does one of two things; they see me and they think 'oh look that's absolutely fantastic' and 'we've seen you on the video', and it also creates instant rapport with the purchaser."
Aside from the basic script, Bastin said the videos are mostly spontaneous.
"It's just about showing different things that you can't show through photos and through scripts," he said.
Hugging bunny rabbits
In one video Bastin can be seen petting a homeowners' bunny rabbit.
"I said 'do you mind if I use the bunny?' and they said 'no, go for it'. It's really important that the vendors are involved the whole way through - by getting them involved with the video, they feel that they have a big part in the sales process as well."
Bastin said he believes a video-based approach to selling properties is the way of the future.
Planting kale
"Times are changing and technology is becoming more prevalent within marketing properties and we just find you have to have something slightly different to capture purchasers attention, and this is what it's for."
"I really enjoy making the videos and I enjoy getting the vendors involved," he said.
Snow angels on the bed
Bastin is not the only estate agent in New Zealand to create videos to showcase property, Tim Webb of Wallace & Stratton on the North Shore wrote a song The Cash Cow Blues and made a video to attract attention to a listed property in Howick.
