What makes a listing video worth watching

You have probably read that listing videos get some large percentage more engagement, or that listings with video sell some number of days faster. We are not going to repeat any of those figures, and it is worth saying why before anything else.

Why there is no percentage in this guide

We have one product, a small number of customers, and no dataset that connects a video we rendered to a sale that closed. So any conversion figure on this page would be borrowed from somebody else's marketing page, and the ones in circulation are mostly untraceable — quoted from a blog that quotes a blog, with the original study either paywalled, twenty years old, or nonexistent.

A vendor quoting a statistic it cannot source is telling you something about the vendor, not about video. So: mechanism only, below. When we have production numbers of our own that survive a confidence interval, we will publish those, with the sample size attached.

What a listing video is actually competing against

Not other listing videos. On a phone it is competing with everything else in the feed, and on a listing portal it is competing with the photo carousel that is already right there and already loaded.

That framing decides most of the content questions:

• Against the feed, the first second decides everything. There is no title card, no logo sting, no slow fade from black. Those are habits from a medium where the audience had already sat down.
• Against the photo carousel, the video has to do something a photo cannot. Motion through a space, the sense of how rooms connect, the scale of a yard. If the video is a slideshow of the same photos, the carousel wins — it is faster and it lets the buyer control the pace.

The decisions that are genuinely yours

Most of a listing video is determined by the photos. Four things are not, and they are where the quality lives.

1. Which six photos, and in what order

Covered in the format guide, but the short version: the order is the edit. A tool that takes your photos in upload order is letting your file manager direct the video.

2. Whether the words on screen are true

Room labels, price, beds, baths, your licence line. Every one of those is a factual statement about a real property, published by you, in an advertisement. Typos in a caption are embarrassing; a wrong bed count on a graphic is a different category of problem. Type them once, check them once, and never let a model draw them.

3. Whether anything in the frame is invented

This is the one that has changed in the last two years, and it is the reason this company exists in the form it does.

An image-to-video model handed a photo of a kitchen does not "move a camera through" that kitchen. It generates plausible frames. Sometimes that produces a convincing push through a real room. Sometimes it produces a doorway that is not there, a window where a wall was, an extra cabinet run, a countertop in a different stone. On a music video that is a style. On an advertisement for a house with an address, it is a statement about that house that is not true.

Every segment we generate is checked against the photo it came from before it ships. Segments that pass ship as generated motion. Segments that do not ship as a slow camera move over your actual photograph, which cannot invent a room because there is nothing in the frame you did not photograph. Segments the checker could not reach ship labelled not confirmed rather than as a pass. Your video summary says which is which, segment by segment. At the point our checker currently runs, roughly one segment of a 6-segment video is generated motion and the rest are camera moves over your real photos.

That is a smaller number than the marketing for this category implies, and we would rather you hear it from us. It is also the whole point: a camera move over your own photograph cannot misrepresent the property, because there is nothing in the frame that was not in the photograph.

4. Whether it is posted at all

The most common failure mode of a listing video is not that it was bad. It is that it was rendered on a Thursday, needed one more crop for the feed version, and never went up. Three ratios out of one render exists for exactly that reason.

A short list of things to leave out

• Your headshot in the first frame. The buyer is looking for the house.
• Slow fades from black between every room. They cost runtime you measured in seconds.
• Music with a vocal. It fights the captions and it dates the video.
• Any claim about the neighbourhood you cannot source. "Great schools" and "safe area" are advertising claims about a protected-class proxy in one reading and an unsourced statistic in another. See the caption checker.
• A price banner on a video you will reuse after a reduction. Burned-in text is burned in.

General information, not legal advice. Advertising law, MLS rules and broker policy vary by market and change often. Confirm anything specific with your broker, your MLS, and — where money or rights are at stake — your own attorney.

ReeltyPro turns the listing photos you already have into a 6-segment video in 16:9, 9:16 and 1:1, and tells you segment by segment which parts are generated motion and which are a camera move over your own photograph.