Listing reels: which style to pick

A reel is a vertical video built from your listing photos, in your brand's colors and fonts. There are four styles. They are genuinely different edits, not the same video in different colors.

Classic tour

About 27 seconds. A room-by-room walk through the house. The exterior opens and closes the reel shown whole, with the interiors in between. The safe choice, and the right one most of the time.

Cinematic

About 16 seconds. Four long, slow shots and almost no text. Use it when a handful of photos are genuinely good and you want them to hold attention on their own. It is the wrong choice for a property whose appeal is the number of rooms.

Quick cut

About 28 seconds. Sixteen fast cuts on the beat. Good when the interiors carry the property and you want energy. One tradeoff worth knowing: at this speed there is no room to show the outside of the house whole, so the exterior gets cropped. If the exterior is what sells this listing, pick a different style.

Text first

About 27 seconds. The words lead and the photo sits beneath them. This is the one for a listing where the photography is weaker. A phone-shot condo still needs a reel, and this style leans on what you can say rather than what you can show.

Turning the text off

Any of these can run with nothing written over the photos. Tick "No text over the photos" under the style list and the room labels, the address, and the price all come off, leaving the photography and the camera work to carry it.

The closing card stays: your logo, your headshot, your name, your phone, your email, and the Equal Housing notice. No text means no text over the photos, not a reel with your name taken off it.

Pick it when you would rather write the caption yourself, or when the photography is strong enough that anything on top of it is in the way. It works with Auto too, and that combination is the one least likely to hand you a template instead, because almost everything a reel can get wrong is something it said.

The exception is Text first. That style is built around its type, so there is nothing left of it once the words come off, and the option is switched off when you pick it.

What you need before you can render one

• At least three photos on the listing.
• Both logo files in your brand kit: the full-color one and the white one.
• Both fonts, heading and body.

If any of those are missing the button tells you which. We would rather not make a reel at all than make one that does not carry your branding.

About the audio

Reels come out silent, on purpose. On Instagram and TikTok the trending sound is half the reach, and a video with our music on it is one you would have to strip before posting.

Instead, every cut lands on a beat. Drop your own audio over the top in the app you are posting from and the edit will already be in time with it.