How long should a listing video be?

Start with two numbers you already have. How many photos are worth showing, and how many words you want said.

A 600 square foot studio condo in Chicago might have 9 photos worth using. At an average hold of about 2.2 seconds, that is 20 seconds of picture, and the film should be about that long. A $2.1M waterfront in Tampa might have 24 good frames, a dock at sunset that deserves four seconds on its own and a script about the seawall and the boat lift. That film can run 55 seconds and feel short.

So the honest answer is that the house sets the length, and the platform sets the ceiling you should stay under. Here are both halves.

Our ranges by destination

Every cap is far above where a listing film should land. Nobody has ever lost a showing because their Reel was 35 seconds instead of 3 minutes.

Shots per second, the short form test

On Reels, TikTok and Shorts, aim for something new every second or two after the hook. A 30 second film with 15 strong shots feels quick. A 30 second film with six shots, three of them the same living room, feels long even though the clock says otherwise.

A rough check: count new rooms or features per ten seconds. Under three on a short form cut, and it is time to cut.

Words per second, the narration test

A comfortable voiceover pace is about 2.3 to 2.5 words a second. A 30 second film holds 65 to 75 words with room for the hook to land. If your script is 120 words, either the film becomes 50 seconds or the script loses 45 words. It should almost always lose the words: adjectives first, then any line that names what is on screen. Scripts that sell the showing has word counts by length.

Music only films can run a little shorter for the same photos, because nothing is waiting for a sentence to finish. Keep captions to key facts so viewers are not reading the whole time.

Long form is a different job

On the MLS and your listing page, the viewer is not deciding whether to stop scrolling. They are deciding whether to drive over. Their questions are practical: how do the rooms connect, how big is the yard, what do the bathrooms look like. A calmer 70 second film that answers them beats a punchy 25 second one that skips the second bath.

One edit, trimmed per destination

You do not need two films. Plan one full walkthrough for the listing page and MLS and trim it for the feeds: drop the hall bath and the second exterior, shorten the close. Our films are planned with variable shot lengths, so a 50 second edit and a 30 second edit of the same house both feel paced rather than squeezed. If a cut runs long, ask the AI Director to “make it under 30 seconds” and only the changed parts re-render.

How to tell yours is too long

Watch it muted on your phone. The moment your thumb wants to skip is the cut. Then check retention in the app's insights, if it shows it: a steep drop in one place almost always means a weak or repeated shot there. And look at the last five seconds. If they are logos and contact text, most viewers never reached them.

The ranges exist to stop the obvious mistakes, a two minute Reel or a 15 second MLS tour. Past that, trust the edit over the clock. Our free length planner takes your photo count and script and suggests a length per platform, and the examples page shows the same homes in every cut.