Property video sizes: the right formats for portals, Instagram and TikTok

A property video is not one deliverable. The clip that looks premium embedded in a portal listing looks wrong on TikTok, and the cut that thrives on a For You page would feel frantic embedded in a portal listing. Format is not an export setting; it is an editorial decision about where the viewer is and what they will tolerate.

Here are the three formats that cover how buyers and tenants actually encounter listings, with the exact dimensions, and what each cut has to do differently to earn its keep.

The three sizes at a glance

The platform specifications below are stable and published by the platforms themselves, for example in Instagram's own help documentation. Everything else about the cut, pacing, opening and length flows from where each format lives.

16:9, the portal cut

Landscape is the format of intent. The viewer on a portal has already clicked your listing and wants to be shown around, so the cut can afford calm: slower drifts, longer holds, the light doing the talking. Its job is to close, converting interest that already exists into a showing request.

This is also the version that travels in email applicant matches and embeds on your own site, which makes it the workhorse of the three; our portal guide covers where and how to place it. If a listing gets only one format, it gets this one, though the inquiry statistics argue strongly for running all three.

4:5, the feed cut

Instagram's feed displays portrait media at 4:5, which fills more screen than a landscape clip without demanding the viewer rotate anything. The audience state is the opposite of the portal: nobody chose your property, you are interrupting a scroll, politely.

That changes the edit. The feed cut leads with the single strongest room, because it has roughly three seconds to earn a pause before the thumb moves on. Once the pause happens, the caption and profile do the selling. Choosing which photo can carry that opening is a big part of which photos animate best.

9:16, the discovery cut

Full-screen vertical is where audiences who have never heard of your agency find it. TikTok, Reels and Stories are sound-on, full-bleed and ruthless: the cut opens on motion already happening, with no title card and no slow build, because the first half second decides whether the viewer stays.

This format is the growth engine of the three. The portal cut converts demand that exists; the vertical cut manufactures demand that did not, one For You page at a time. For agencies building a brand rather than just moving inventory, it is the format that compounds.

It also travels furthest beyond the property itself. A vertical clip of a striking kitchen reaches people who are not currently searching for a home at all, and a share of them remember the agency long after the listing lets. That is marketing the brand and the property with the same asset, which no other format in the set achieves.

Length, sound and captions per platform

Dimensions are half the format decision. The other half is behavior. Portal viewers tolerate length because they chose to be there, so the 16:9 cut can run 45 to 60 seconds and walk the whole property. Feed and vertical viewers did not choose you, so the social cuts work best short: roughly 7 to 15 seconds, one property, strongest rooms only, ending before attention does.

Sound splits the same way. Portals and email are watched silent at desks, so the portal cut must work with no audio at all. TikTok and Reels are sound-on environments where music carries pace, but the clip still needs to survive muted, because Stories and embedded contexts strip audio more often than not. The safe rule: design every cut to work silent, let sound be a bonus.

Finally, respect the interface. Vertical platforms overlay buttons, captions and usernames on the edges of the frame, so anything essential, like the address or the price, belongs in the middle safe zone of the composition rather than the corners. This is exactly the kind of per-platform detail that makes hand-framed cuts look deliberate and centre-cropped exports look like afterthoughts.

Text overlays deserve the same discipline. A short location line and a price help a silent viewer orient instantly, but they should sit within the safe zone, use one consistent typeface, and disappear quickly enough that the property stays the star. If a clip needs three sentences of overlay to make sense, the edit has the wrong opening, not the wrong captions.

The three mistakes that waste a good video

The most common mistake is publishing one landscape export everywhere. On Instagram it renders small and letterboxed; on TikTok it floats in a sea of black pixels while full-bleed competitors fill the screen. The platforms also rank against it, because their systems favor media that matches the native shape of the surface.

The second is centre-cropping a landscape edit into a vertical one. Rooms are composed horizontally, so a centre crop routinely slices sofas in half and beheads doorways. A vertical cut has to be reframed shot by shot, choosing what the tall frame should hold, which is an editing decision rather than an export setting.

The third is opening every cut the same way. A portal viewer will forgive a slow establishing exterior; a For You page will not. When the same opening serves both, it serves neither. Cutting each format for its audience is precisely the work that makes three cuts from one property feel native everywhere they appear.

Getting all three without the export headache

Cutting three formats from one source is fiddly work: each crop reframes every shot, and a straight centre-crop of a landscape edit produces vertical video that looks like an afterthought. This is a production problem, not an agent problem, and it is why every Vistalis order returns all three cuts from the same set of photos, framed individually for each shape, within 24 hours.

You can see the three formats side by side in the portfolio, or put the claim to the test by sending your own listing photos and judging the three cuts that come back.