Two of my favorite video tools are Magisto and Animoto, and I use them all the time to stitch together images and video clips to create share-worthy short videos. Both are available on both smartphones and the web, and both have pretty good versions starting at $60 a year.

This is part of the series called #BethBuysAHouse. The posts all relate to steps sales people can take to sell things… in this case, our new house.

New House Highlight Reel with Magisto

The first video I made was a walkthrough of our new home. We saw the house one day and went back the second. We knew this was the house we wanted, so I started taking little video clips talking through the features I loved so I could share it with friends and family.

Instead of showing the raw footage to people, I plopped the clips with a few of the listing photos into Magisto. This tool uses artificial intelligence to find the best moments in video clips and photos to stitch them together into a highlight reel, set to music and unified with a theme. Then I sent this video to EVERYBODY and posted it on social media. As more people chimed in with the predictable “OMG I LOVE IT!” comments, the video served as a selling tool that convinced us even more that we needed this house. (We take possession Dec. 6!).

Animoto Slideshow to Sell Old House

This week our house in San Diego went on the market, and we don’t want two mortgages! I guess you would call us “Highly Motivated Sellers.” They took the professional photos of the house on Monday, and they turned out great. The photographer had created a video montage already, but I wanted to step it up a little,

So I used a browser extension called Download All Images to, well, download all the images. Then I threw them into Animoto, which  creates a slideshow with a theme and music instantly. I added a couple of captions, and within five minutes, I had this video to share.