Real estate
Does listing video actually sell a house faster?
Agents ask whether video sells houses faster. It is the wrong question, and answering it honestly is more useful than the yes they are hoping for.
What sells a house is price, condition and market. Video does not change any of those. What it changes is who walks through the door and how they feel before they arrive.
The job is the showing
A good listing video does two things. It gets the right buyer to book, and it stops the wrong buyer booking.
The second one is undervalued. Every agent has lost a Saturday to people who were never going to buy the place and who would have known it from ninety seconds of video. Filtering is not a failure of reach. It is the point.
Film the layout, not the finishes
Photos are better than video at finishes. A still of a countertop beats a moving shot of the same countertop.
What photos cannot do is explain how a house works. How the kitchen relates to the back garden. Whether the third bedroom is actually a bedroom. What you see when you come through the front door. Buyers form their real opinion from that, and it is the thing stills consistently fail at.
So the video should move the way a person moves. Through the front door, through the space, in the order somebody would actually walk it.
Include the walk outside
People are buying a street as much as a house, and in Alberta that includes what the drive to work looks like and what is within walking distance.
A short piece of the neighbourhood does more than another angle on the ensuite. It is also the part that is genuinely hard for a competing agent to copy from the listing photos.
The version that keeps working
Listing video has a hard expiry. It is worthless the day the property closes, which means an agent who only makes listing videos is starting from zero on every property.
Content about you does not expire. Explaining what a condition on financing actually means, what buyers get wrong about their first offer, why a house sat for two months and what changed. That material still works next year, and it is what makes a seller call you rather than the agent whose sign they saw.
That is the difference between marketing a property and building a name, and most agents only do the first.
Vertical, almost always
If a video is going anywhere near social, it should be vertical. That is not a stylistic opinion, it is how the phone is held and how the platforms distribute.
The horizontal cut still belongs on the listing page. But if one version is getting made, it is the vertical one.
Common questions
Is video worth it for a real estate listing?
Its job is to get the right people to book a viewing and to stop the wrong people wasting a Saturday. Judge it on whether the showings you get are better qualified, not on whether the house sold quickly, because the market and the price decide that.
What is the difference between a listing video and an agent brand video?
A listing video sells one property and stops being useful the day it closes. A brand video sells you and keeps working across every listing you take. Agents who only ever make listing videos restart from nothing with each one.
Should a listing video be vertical or horizontal?
Vertical, for almost everything that lives on social. That is how the phone is held and how the platforms distribute. A horizontal cut still has a place on the listing page itself, but if only one version is being made, make it vertical.
Do I need a video for every listing?
No, and forcing one on a property that does not deserve it will hurt you. Some homes sell on photos and a floor plan. Video earns its place where a property is unusual, where the layout does not read in stills, or where the neighbourhood is doing part of the selling.