I have watched a truly upsetting number of LA listing videos this year, and they open the same way roughly eighty percent of the time. Drone rises over a hillside. Slow pan to the downtown skyline or the ocean, depending on which side of the 405 we are on. Eight to fourteen seconds of establishing shot. Piano.
Then, finally, the house.
Here is the problem with that opening. By the time the front door appears you have spent the entire budget of the viewer's attention on footage that could be attached to any of four thousand properties. The drone shot is not selling the house. It is selling Los Angeles, and Los Angeles is doing fine on its own.
What the opening shot is for
The first two seconds have exactly one job: make a specific person think "wait, what is that."
So lead with the strangest true thing about the property. The sixteen-foot pivot door. The original 1952 terrazzo. The kitchen window that frames the jacaranda perfectly in May. The staircase that does the thing. If the house has a signature, open on the signature. If the house genuinely does not have one, that is a pricing conversation, not a production one.
A good test: if you cut the first three seconds and showed them to someone who knows the neighborhood, could they name the house? If not, start over.
Length, and the lie about it
Everyone tells you to go shorter. Shorter is not the point. Earned is the point.
A forty-five second tour with one dead moment loses more people than a ninety second tour with none. The question is never how long, it is whether anything in it is filler. Transitions that exist because you liked the transition. A lingering shot of a hallway. A second angle on the same bathroom. Cut all of it.
For vertical social the honest target is under thirty seconds with every shot doing work. For a property page tour you can run longer if the house earns it, and a genuinely architectural property often does.
Sound
Nothing dates a listing video faster than the same four library tracks the entire industry licensed in 2023. If the house has a courtyard fountain, use the fountain. If it is on a quiet street, use the quiet. Ambient audio is free, it is unique to the property, and it does something stock piano never will: it makes the viewer feel like they are standing in a specific place.
If you do use music, pick something with an actual point of view. A house with a personality deserves a track with one.
The caption is not an afterthought
Most listing posts caption with the address, the bed and bath count and five hashtags. That caption is a filing system, not a reason to stop scrolling.
Write one real sentence about the house. Something only someone who has been inside it could write. "The upstairs hallway gets this light around four o'clock that I have not been able to photograph correctly once." That is a caption. People respond to someone who has noticed something.
And the disclosure, because we live in California
If anything in that video is digitally altered, whether that is virtual staging, a sky replacement or a day-to-dusk conversion, your obligations under AB 723 do not disappear because the medium changed. Label it. Keep the originals accessible. There is a whole post about it on this blog and I am not going to apologize for mentioning it twice.
The uncomfortable summary
Most listing videos are made to make the agent look like they have a videographer. The good ones are made to make a buyer get in the car.
Those are different objectives and they produce different edits. Pick the second one.
