Captions for real estate videos: style, safe zones and Spanish subtitles

Watch your own feed for ten minutes and count how often you turn the sound on. For most people it is rarely: on a train, in a waiting room, in bed next to someone asleep. A listing video with narration and no captions is, for that viewer, a silent slideshow with a person mouthing at it. Captions are not an add-on. For a large share of viewers they are the script.

They also matter for buyers who are deaf or hard of hearing, and if the film is embedded on your website, captions for prerecorded video are part of the WCAG accessibility guidelines that most accessibility reviews use. Burned in captions carry everywhere the file goes, which is why we put them on every cut.

Reading speed: slower than you think

Broadcast subtitle guidelines generally land somewhere around 15 to 20 characters per second for adult viewers, and that is for people sitting on a sofa watching a screen they chose. A scroller on a phone has less patience and is looking at the pictures too. We write for the bottom of that range.

Here is what that means in a real film. A 3 second shot gives you room for about 45 characters. "Kitchen redone in 2022, quartz and a gas range" is 46 characters. That is the ceiling, not the target. "Kitchen redone in 2022" reads in one glance and leaves the viewer free to look at the kitchen, which was the point.

• Two lines at most on vertical video, and one is better.
• Around 32 characters per line on a 9:16 frame at a readable size. Longer lines force tiny type.
• Break lines at natural phrase boundaries: "Primary suite / on the main floor", not "Primary suite on / the main floor".
• Numbers as digits. "3 beds" reads faster than "three beds".
• Never caption the full address in a moving style. Put it on a held end card where people can read it.

Pick a style for the home, not for the trend

Word by word captions with a bouncing highlight are everywhere because they suit fast talking creators. They are tiring under a slow luxury film. The style should match the pace of the edit and the price of the house. Property Video Generator has 12 caption styles; this is how we use them.

If you only remember one pairing: Cinema or Minimal for a $2M listing, Karaoke for a $400K family home. The caption style tells the viewer what kind of house this is before the second shot. You can preview all 12 on a sample listing with the free caption styles tool.

Keep text out of the buttons

On a 1080x1920 vertical frame, the app draws its own interface over your video. The bottom fifth or so carries the account name, the post caption and the audio label. On TikTok and Reels, a column of buttons runs up the right edge. The top strip has the app's own header. Put your caption in any of those areas and it gets covered on someone's phone, usually the phone of the person you most wanted to reach.

The exact pixels shift with app versions and screen sizes, so we do not trust a fixed number. The practical rule: keep captions in the middle band of the frame, a little above centre, and clear of the right edge. Property Video Generator keeps text inside the Reels and TikTok safe zone automatically, even when you drag it around on the live preview. To check a video made elsewhere, drop a frame into the safe zone checker.

Captions on the MLS cut

The unbranded MLS cut still benefits from captions, as long as they contain property facts and nothing that identifies you. "Primary suite on the main floor" is fine. Your name, phone number, website or brokerage is not, under the rules of many MLSs. Rules vary, so check yours.

Translating captions for Spanish speaking buyers

The Census Bureau's American Community Survey counts more than 40 million people in the US who speak Spanish at home. In Miami, San Antonio, Los Angeles or Houston, a Spanish version of a listing film is not a gesture; it reaches a large part of the buyer pool in the language they think in. Advertising in Spanish is entirely compatible with fair housing rules, as long as you market the same home on the same terms in every language.

In Property Video Generator, every one of the 10 voices speaks all 10 supported languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Hindi, Italian, Dutch, Japanese and Chinese. Switching the language rewrites the narration and the captions together, so they stay in sync. Before you post a translated film, check a few things that machine translation and AI voices can get subtly wrong:

1. Have a fluent speaker read the captions once. Ideally someone from the community you are marketing to, since vocabulary differs between, say, Mexican and Puerto Rican Spanish (recámara, cuarto, habitación).
2. Keep US units. Buyers here think in square feet, not metres; "1,640 pies cuadrados" is clearer than a converted figure.
3. Check the price formatting reads naturally: "$489,000" works in US Spanish.
4. Check that street names and place names are not translated. Calle Oak Street is wrong.
5. Make sure Spanish captions still fit the safe zone. Spanish text commonly runs 15 to 30 percent longer than the English source, so lines that fit in English can wrap to three lines.
6. Put the Spanish version on its own post with a Spanish post caption, rather than stacking two caption languages on one video.

The length point catches people. If an English line was at the 32 character limit, the Spanish one will be over it. Shorten the English source line first, then re-translate, rather than shrinking the type.

Fonts and brand

A caption font does more brand work than a logo, because it is on screen for the whole film. Property Video Generator has 12 type kits (Gallery, Editorial, Luxury, Classic, Geometric, Social bold, Minimal mono, Signature, Coastal, Architect, Urban, Heritage) and 38 fonts, and paid plans can upload a brand font as TTF, OTF or WOFF2. Pick one kit for your brand and keep it across listings. A feed where every film uses a different font looks like the work of six agents.

More on voices and caption options on the voice and captions page.