RESIDENTIAL REAL ESTATE : Video Sales Entrepreneur to Launch Home Sales ‘Infomercial’ on KABC

Move over, Robin Leach.

Orange County video real estate sales entrepreneur Chris Carmichael and crew are launching a 30-minute “infomercial” television show, “California Lifestyles,” on KABC-TV this month.

The show is scheduled to air, beginning June 21, at 8:30 a.m. Sundays (Carmichael swears this is a good time to sell houses). It operates on the premise that people care as much about the neighborhoods in which home developments are located as about the homes themselves.

So Carmichael is packaging each sponsoring developer’s project in the midst of a segment exploring the area’s schools, parks, shopping, recreation facilities and social life.

The show has an initial 16-week run and Carmichael’s Prime Time Cable Network Inc., the producer, has won immediate credibility by signing housing giant Kaufman & Broad Home Corp. as its first featured developer.

A spokesman for the Los Angeles-based home builder said K&B; began trying television advertising earlier this year, liked the results and is looking at “California Lifestyles” as an extension of its advertising campaign.

Carmichael said he met K&B; President Bruce Karatz at a recent builders conference in San Francisco and sold him immediately on the idea.

In addition to the custom-tailored segments on the neighborhoods the developers’ projects are in, the program features direct feedback by way of an 800 line that viewers can use to call for more information or to order sales brochures.

“We will be able to put together reports, available almost immediately to the developers, showing them where the interest in each project is coming from,” Carmichael said.

“California Lifestyles” is an outgrowth of Carmichael’s past five years of advertising real estate on cable television, first with a program called “California Real Estate Show” and then with “Premier Real Estate Show.” Neither of the shows airs any longer.

He has also developed and is still trying to market a program called “Prime Time Hot Properties,” featuring exclusive video footage of multimillion-dollar estates.

Connie Jordan, president of Prime Time Cable Network, said the company began moving toward the exclusive property market several years ago when a well-known Beverly Hills-area realtor called and asked if the company could be hired to shoot footage of the estate of Clothestime women’s clothing chain co-founder Michael DeAngelo in the hills of Orange.

The agent had clients overseas, Jordan said, and wanted a video to send to them (the DeAngelo estate, originally priced at $22 million, has since been listed by several other agencies and had the asking price slashed to about $13 million; it’s still on the market).

Since then, Carmichael has shot more than 100 estate properties for realtors who specialize in the top end of the market. He said the properties have included the Aaron Spelling estate in Beverly Hills and an estate that belonged to the Sultan of Brunei.

But while they are hopeful of landing a cable deal for a show built around video tours of fancy estates, Carmichael and Jordan are devoting much of their energy these days to the launch of “California Lifestyles.”

“Television is the No. 1 household appliance in terms of hours of daily use, but it is the most unused medium in real estate. We want to change that, not by doing away with builders’ traditional advertising (in newspapers and handbills) but by augmenting it. When you can put ‘As seen on Television’ in your print ad, it validates it for a lot of people.”