As real estate agents flock to all of the new and enhanced web applications recently becoming available for showing off properties, it’s becoming easy to be distracted by the ease of use of these latest generation apps.

Just pop in a few pictures.  Plug in the contact details.  Boom – you’ve got an instant online presentation, often very high quality at that.

But, just how effective is this strategy?  After all, the slideshow style web “videos” created by programs such as Real Estate Shows that use a series of static individual photographs transitioned together one after another, well… sort of miss their mark as genuine bonafide videos.  Joel Burslem over at The Future of Real Estate Marketing Blog in a recent related post said:

I’m a fan of the Real Estate Shows (RES) product even though I’m not personally that fond of the slideshow type presentations it generates - I prefer video tours myself, but that’s just my bag. That said, the RES platform makes it quick and easy for Realtors to create a slick looking presentation that is miles above the whirl-around-til-I-puke 360 tour. That, in of itself, is a win - the more Realtors abandoning that ancient technology the better, in my books.

Now while I agree with him that the slideshow presentations are indeed heads and tails above the dizzying 360 degree virtual tour technology of the past, I’m going to contend that these slideshow presentations will only survive as a real tool for a short while.  After all, even the MySpace crowd is growing wary of them (just ask your teenager about the digital picture slideshows used on MySpace).

As everyday budget digital cameras come with better and better full frame video capabilities and computers these days even arrive preloaded with great basic video editing software, there’s really no excuse not to offer real video tours on the web.

After all, YouTube can effectively be used for back end distribution as long as a good quality and good resolution production is created in the first place, making it super simple to put the video on a broker’s site, on an individual agent’s site or blog, and on any property specific sites all at the same time from the same source.  Plus, video is viewable on iPhones and some YouTube compatible televisions.  Proprietary slideshow type presentations are not.

So, how much longer will this virtual video trend last?

Well, I wish I could give an accurate answer.  But to be on the safe side, why not skip it altogether and move right on to producing real video?