Looking for any new angle to help overcome a sluggish real estate market, realtors, destination clubs, private residence clubs and even condo-hotels are using the video-sharing website YouTube as a marketing tool to spread the word about new properties. The result is that YouTube, once scoured only by teenagers and 20-somethings looking for funny videos, is now a logical online destination for time-efficient house-hunters who would prefer to see a preview video of potential vacation home before deciding whether or not to travel the distance for an in-person inspection.

Approximately 80 percent of homebuyers now begin their property search on the Internet and with more than 70 million videos downloaded on YouTube daily, it’s no wonder realtors and developers are sharing videos on the site. As an added incentive, posting and viewing videos on YouTube is free, so taking advantage of the advertising opportunity is a no-brainer for savvy marketers. And unlike the now staid-seeming 360 degree “virtual tours” often seen on a property’s website, a full video, complete with evocative music and informative voice-overs, can effectively set the tone and ambiance of a property and its target audience.

So just how many properties are taking advantage of the free marketing opportunity offered by YouTube? A recent search of the site’s videos using the words “Residence Club” pulled up 181 videos, including spots for BelleHavens Destination Club, the Northstar Lodge Hyatt Residence Club, Four Seasons Residence Club Punta Mita and Exclusive Resorts, among others. The Exclusive Resorts video, which has had 372 views since being posted in 2007, features peppy, agreeable music (think violins with a beat) and a voiceover explanation of how the destination club works while the view zips pleasantly through an array of stylish graphics, still images and videos of the various properties and locations. The format works well to showcase the globetrotting nature of destination clubs, with the video effortlessly whirling from one luxurious location to another.

The challenge for real estate marketers will not be in using YouTube to host videos of their properties, but in directing eyes to these pages. YouTube’s robust collection of user submitted videos (83.4 million and growing by more than 100,000 a day) makes it easy for a company’s video to get lost among the stacks, even if it is explicitly labeled. For example a search for “Northstar” will yield several hundred videos of amateur snowboarding before a user sees one relating to real estate opportunities. YouTube can best be used by real estate marketers as a method of delivering content to users it has already succesfully contacted, but not as a means of reaching those users in the first place.