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Comcast Redefines Home Shopping Network
Million-ton media gorilla Comcast has rolled out an interactive real estate shopping channel on its On-Demand network in Portland (one of only a handful of markets nationwide), where you can plop down in your Barcalounger to channel surf up to 3,000 property listings each week.
If you have Comcast On-Demand service, check out channel 888, and look for the Real Estate section. Homes for sale in the Portland metro area are sorted by area and price range. Make a selection and sit back while a 15-second spot for each listing appears. Every listing gets 3 digital photos treated with the Ken Burns effect, plus a text-to-speech narration of the agent’s comments to complete the video advertisement. Each segment lasts 7 minutes for a total of 20 - 28 listings per segment.
A local company, HouseInDemand.com is the exclusive Portland-area agent for selling these ads. I daresay they are going to be raking it in as agents look for new cost-effective, digital means to market their listings. I haven’t used it yet but HouseInDemand’s listing templates has made the process verrrry easy from what I can tell, so even technophobe agents should be able to create their ads effectively.
HouseInDemand claims over 25,000 viewers during just its second week of operation. (The On-Demand client base in the Portland area is approximately 400,000 viewers.) I suspect some of this traffic is due to the ‘looky-lou’ factor and their advertising blitz. For the next week, I would expect to see a fair bit of the Buena Vista inventory getting some pre-auction promotion.
For agents, it’s a relatively affordable advertising outlet—just $115 per week for ‘TV advertising’, arguably a better deal than pouring well over $100 into a one-shot, 4-line Open House ad in the Sunday Oregonian. But it won’t reach non-cable broadcast viewers, alternate cable provider or Dish/Direct subscribers.
So, I’m a DISH subscriber and haven’t used the Comcast On-Demand service. Has anyone out there seen Channel 888, and do you think homebuyers will use it to shop for a new house?
Is it Comcastic or merely bombastic?
[tags] Portland, Oregon, homes, houses, marketing, advertising, Comcast, cable, on demand, real estate [/tags]
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5 Responses to “Comcast Redefines Home Shopping Network”
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Comcast also does pet adoption, car sales, dates (!), etc. through this method. I haven’t tried the real estate feature yet but the previous methods mentioned all came across a bit hokey.
This is just marketers trying to get advertising dollars. This won’t help more than an open house. I could almost see car listings working but with rmls.com, realtor.com and all of the agents sites, why bother flipping through there.
It won’t be as fast a surfing the internet. The real estate industry does not lack marketers telling us how we are essentially idiots if we don’t use their product or service.
Right now I can list a home for a special price on Realtor.com. I can list it for free on zillow.com. I can create a blog with a unique url for a small fee.
And there a many other places, free and for a fee, that I can list a house. In the end the rmls is the best place for all realtor listings. Other than that it is a crap shoot to find FSBO’s.
But many agents will pay for this and other services to impress the seller even though it might work .5% of the time, just like an open house.
[...] Comcast Redefines Home Shopping Network [...]
lol at the bombastic joke - haven’t heard that in years. Good question over whether consumers will shop for homes through that channel. I operate in the Canadian market and I’m divided ove that.
I don’t think this can sell a home. In the 10-second spot, it is impossible to see enough to know if it is anything interesting to me. And the very limited search engine doesn’t allow me to focus into the specific area I want. I have to sit through a lot of places I’m not interested in before I get to anything I might be interested in–and then I don’t see enough to know if I want it. Mostly it just seems like an ego-stroke for the seller and realtor.