All platform facts were checked on 17 October 2026, unless another date is shown.
The short answer
Practitioners and vendors usually advise 30 to 45 seconds for social media, 45 to 90 seconds for a listing page video and 90 to 180 seconds for a full filmed tour. Their ranges disagree, and none of them comes from property watch-through data, because we found none. Treat them as opinion.
Make the video as short as the home allows. Cut photos, not speed.
Platform and portal limits
These are facts, with the source and the date we checked.
Instagram Reels. Instagram's Reels page says: "Create multi-clip videos up to 3 minutes." It also says: "You can record and edit videos up to 20 minutes with Instagram Reels." And: "Reels over 3 minutes won't be recommended to new audiences." Read in part. The 3-minute limit was announced for creators in the United States on 21 January 2025, and before that only Reels up to 90 seconds were eligible for recommendation. We saw that on a translated page, and it was a US rollout first. We did not find a UK date, so check the app.
YouTube Shorts. YouTube's help page says the Shorts tools make it easy to create short-form videos that are "up to 3 minutes long". Read in part. YouTube's article on three-minute Shorts is reported to say that a Short over one minute with an active Content ID claim is blocked. We saw that only in a search extract. That matters if you add a claimed music track. For uploads, YouTube is reported to count square or vertical videos up to 3 minutes as Shorts.
Rightmove. We searched Rightmove's Technical Guidelines (January 2026) for a video length limit and found none. The guidelines ask that "the quality of the video is reasonable" and bar text in videos. Read from the source. Rightmove's help pages, as we read them on 15 October 2026, describe video as a YouTube or Vimeo link, not a file upload. We did not reread them today.
Zoopla. Zoopla's help pages, dated December 2024 and January 2025 and read on 15 October 2026, say video is a URL pasted into ZooplaPro, with approved embeds including YouTube, Vimeo and Matterport. YouTube Shorts are not accepted. These pages are old, so check Zoopla's help before you rely on them. We did not find a length limit.
TikTok and Facebook. We did not reach official limits for either, and conflicting figures circulate. We state none.
What UK suppliers sell
Filmed lengths are real market evidence, because they are what agents buy.
- Property Photo Guy gives a typical walkthrough length of 60 seconds to 3 minutes. Source: property video.
- Clyde Digital's basic walkthrough runs up to 120 seconds, and its creative video up to 90 seconds. Source: property video prices.
These are two suppliers, so read them as examples, not as a standard.
What the data says
There is no study of listing video length that we could find, from a portal, an agent body or a regulator. We searched and found none. That is absence in our searches, not proof that none exists.
The one large dataset we found is general business video. Wistia's video length report, published 1 July 2025, analysed more than 13 million videos on its hosting platform and says "Videos under a minute average a 52% engagement rate." Wistia defines engagement as how much of a video people watch on average. Read in part. This is B2B and marketing video hosted on Wistia. It is not property video, and it is not social feeds. Use it as general evidence that shorter videos hold more of a viewer, not as a number for your listing.
We also leave out the "8-second attention span" statistic. It is widely disputed.
What people recommend
Practitioners and vendors give ranges, and they disagree. This is opinion.
- 30 to 45 seconds for social media, and 45 to 90 seconds for presentations on a listing page, on Fotober, a video editing company's page.
- 90 to 180 seconds for a full tour, on a photography guide.
- "A clean 45-second tour outperforms a padded 90-second one", on a vendor page. No data comes with it.
The ranges overlap in one place: nothing longer than needed. The video should end when the home has been shown.
How long a Scenella tour runs
A Scenella tour has 5, 10 or 15 photos. Each photo gets a scene of about 3.5 seconds, and neighbouring scenes overlap by half a second as one fades into the next. That gives these approximate lengths before the opening title and the outro:
| Photos | Scene length | Approximate length of the scenes |
|---|---|---|
| 3 (short tour) | About 4.5 seconds | About 12.5 seconds |
| 4 (short tour) | About 4.2 seconds | About 15.5 seconds |
| 5 | About 3.5 seconds | About 15.5 seconds |
| 10 | About 3.5 seconds | About 30.5 seconds |
| 15 | About 3.5 seconds | About 45.5 seconds |
These are nominal figures from the scene length. The title and outro add time, so a finished file runs longer, and a 15-photo tour may come close to a minute. We have not published measured runtimes yet and do not promise one.
Scenella recommends at least 5 photos. With 3 or 4, you can continue and get longer scenes. Every tour is well inside the 3 minutes that Instagram and YouTube Shorts allow, so no platform limit forces a cut.
Which cut goes where
Make two files from the same photos:
- 16:9, landscape. For the listing page, an email to the vendor, YouTube and anywhere a video plays in a wide window. Rightmove and Zoopla take video as a hosted link, so a 16:9 file on YouTube or Vimeo is the usual route. Rightmove's terms bar text in videos and anything that identifies a person, and a Scenella video carries an on-screen label and can carry titles and an agent card. Read our guide to the UK rules and check with Rightmove before you link one.
- 9:16, vertical. For Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, where the video fills a phone screen. Zoopla does not accept Shorts, so keep the 16:9 file for the portals.
Scenella exports both from one render. For a step-by-step on the whole process, see the guide to making a video from photos.