Instagram Reels size, TikTok safe zones and every other spec a listing video needs

That table is the whole job for most listing films. Shoot nothing at 4K for these placements, export 1080 wide, keep the file under a minute, and you will never hit a cap. The rest of this page is about the parts the table cannot show: safe zones, covers, and which numbers you should not trust from a random cheat sheet, including this one in six months.

Which numbers are official, and which are folklore

Resolutions and length caps come from the platforms' own help pages and upload screens, and they hold up. Safe zones are a different story.

• Meta publishes one. Its ads guidance for 9:16 placements (Reels, Stories, Facebook Reels) says to keep the top 14%, the bottom 35% and 6% on each side free of text and logos. That is written for ads, which carry a Sponsored label and a call to action button, but the organic interface sits in roughly the same places.
• TikTok publishes templates, not a table. Its ads tools hand out safe zone overlay files and say the zone moves with caption length and ad format. The pixel numbers you see everywhere (130 top, 484 bottom, 44 left, 140 right on a 1080 x 1920 frame) are measurements of those templates by third parties. They are good numbers; they are not TikTok's numbers.
• YouTube publishes nothing for Shorts in pixels. Every Shorts safe zone you have seen is someone's measurement of the player on their phone. We work to the TikTok box for Shorts and it has never cost us a caption.
• Instagram organic Reels have no official safe zone at all. People use Meta's ads figures, which is sensible, since they are the most conservative.

So when a guide says “the TikTok safe zone is exactly 140 pixels”, read it as “people who measured it got about 140 pixels”. The interface changes with app updates, device aspect ratios and how long your caption is. Build a margin into the margin.

Safe zones in pixels, on a 1080 x 1920 frame

Put the two vertical boxes on top of each other and the area that is safe everywhere is roughly 950 wide by 980 tall, sitting a little above the middle of the frame. That is smaller than people expect. It is why big centred captions in the lower third, the look most editors default to, get eaten by TikTok's caption and Instagram's audio label.

Check your own frame against the overlays with the free safe zone checker. In Property Video Generator the caption and text layers are held inside the shared safe box when you drag them on the preview, so this is one thing you do not have to measure.

Covers: design for the crop, not the frame

A Reel cover is uploaded at 1080 x 1920, but the place it does most of its work is your profile grid, which since early 2025 shows a 3:4 crop: the middle 1080 x 1440, losing 240 pixels top and bottom. So a cover with the street name at the very top and “just listed” at the very bottom shows neither on the grid. Keep cover text in the middle half.

TikTok lets you choose a frame or upload an image; its profile grid is also taller than square, so the same rule works. YouTube Shorts mostly picks a frame from the video in the mobile app, which is a good argument for making your first frame the best photo of the home rather than a title card.

4:5 versus 9:16 in the Instagram feed

A 9:16 Reel shown in the main Instagram feed is cropped to about 4:5 for display. A 4:5 video posted to the feed shows whole in the feed, but in the full-screen Reels viewer it sits with bars above and below. Neither is wrong. Our rule: 9:16 when you want reach from people who do not follow you, 4:5 when the post is for your sphere and will mostly be seen in the feed, on Facebook especially.

Square is fading on Instagram but has not died everywhere. It is still the best shape for email, where a 1080 x 1080 thumbnail with a play button sits cleanly in a column of text, and on LinkedIn. Widescreen belongs on YouTube, your listing website and the MLS tour field, which is a separate set of rules covered in video for the MLS.

Export settings that do not get recompressed into mush

• H.264 in an MP4, 30 frames per second. Higher frame rates add nothing to slow camera moves over still photos.
• 1080 wide for vertical and feed cuts. Uploading 4K vertical to Instagram does not make it look sharper; the app scales it down anyway.
• A bitrate around 8 to 12 Mbps for 1080 x 1920. Too low and the platform's second compression pass turns hardwood floors into smudges.
• Stereo AAC audio at 48 kHz, and music normalised so narration sits clearly above it.

Every film from Property Video Generator comes out in all five shapes from one edit: 9:16 at 1080 x 1920, 4:5 at 1080 x 1350, 1:1 at 1080 x 1080, 16:9 at 1920 x 1080 and an unbranded MLS widescreen cut. Each shot is reframed for its screen rather than centre cropped, which matters most for wide exterior photos going vertical. Paid plans export at 1080p; the free plan exports at 720p with a watermark.

Where to post which cut, and why the same film behaves differently on each platform, is covered in Reels vs TikTok vs Shorts for real estate.