Real Estate Videos Go Hollywood

The Academy Awards may have to add a category: Best Short Film Starring a Real Estate Listing. Listing videos--which for years have been little more than visual tours of homes set to annoying music--have entered a new realm. They've gone Hollywood, right down to having a story line.

Eric Lavey, an agent with Keller Williams Realty, Beverly Hills, may be the Fellini of this new marketing genre. He produced a "movie short" about a Hollywood Hills listing, marketing it as a sizzling Hollywood Hills bachelor's home and reeled in (pardon the pun) a buyer in less than 30 days. What made his $969,000 listing different from all the others?

"That video," he says.