Real Estate Channel merges the web, TV, bricks & mortar

The Real Estate Channel, a Vancouver based television channel and web portal for Western Canadian properties, has climbed with the upward swing of the Canadian real estate industry throughout the last half-decade. But now that the global housing bubble has clearly popped, what will they do for an encore?

Well, for one thing, the company uses both TV and the internet for different approaches to selling the same property, something very few other firms are doing at the moment.

“The internet broadcast enables us to reach markets and an audience that are outside of Canada or our current cable transmissions.  There is an enormous power in being able to deliver a dedicated television feed into the living rooms of 500,000 Canadian households so obviously this offers us a tremendous advantage for brand awareness that easily spills over into our internet audience and our overall online presence.  We can have a very sophisticated tracking system that allows us to monitor traffic referring to our site from our television audience so in this regard, the two mediums are indispensible,” Real Estate Channel president Leon Ng said.

In the past there have been networks dedicated to real estate scattered throughout the country, Ng said, but none had successfully bridged the gap between traditional television viewers and internet audiences.

“The television is a great way to get people interested in properties and point them to our website which in turn functions as a great resource, allowing buyers and sellers to research and share information in their own time,” he said.

Currently, the network operates in Vancouver, as well as in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The channel is also in negotiations with networks in the US and in Asia, which was possible to what Ng called “technology that allows us to launch separate feeds with minimal cost and manpower.” He added that since they use an automated system to maintain the channel and the site, they can work much more efficiently.

Future plans include a look at the iPhone and Blackberry platforms, which Ng said offer a tremendous opportunity for creative applications for real estate listings.

“Video is a bit tougher in the Canadian market as opposed to some other markets because of restrictions that have been put on bandwidth by the cellular companies. But it's a situation we're constantly watching and for those markets where video is more widespread, such as in the US, it's definitely in the cards,” Ng said.

There's certainly no shortage of web sites that have real estate listings out there, but none of them are tied directly with a 24-hour cable channel that provides a great presentation of those listings. The videos that we create are created for television first, but we've been successful because we've tied these media together,” he added.