Property Tours With the Agent in Frame

A property tour has to do two things that pull against each other. It has to show the space honestly, completely, at a pace a buyer can follow. And it has to attach a person to the listing, because people enquire with agents, not with buildings.

Film only the rooms and you have a slideshow. Put yourself in half the frame and you have taken half the property away from the person deciding whether to view it.

Why Small PIP, landscape

Small PIP is the correct weighting here and one of the few cases where small genuinely is right. The buyer is assessing ceiling height, light, proportions, flow. Every pixel you take from the room is a pixel taken from the thing being sold. A small inset is enough to establish that a real person is walking them through it.

Landscape, because rooms are wide and portal listings and YouTube both expect horizontal video. A vertical frame shows a strip of each room and makes small spaces look smaller.

For Reels and TikTok, film portrait, but accept that you will need more shots, held longer, because each one covers less.

Walking a property on camera

This is the skill, and it is mostly footwork.

Walk heel to toe, slowly. Slower than feels right. A viewer needs time to read a room and you already know the layout, which makes everything feel slower to you than to them.

Elbows in. Pinning your upper arms to your ribs is the cheapest stabilisation available.

Pause in doorways. Stop for a beat as you enter each room. It gives the viewer a moment to orient and it gives you a clean cut point.

Reveal, do not sweep. Fast pans make spaces unreadable. Move through the space rather than swinging the camera across it.

Do not walk backwards down stairs. Obvious until you are mid-take and committed.

Where to put the inset

The corner matters more here than in most formats, because property footage is full of information.

• Avoid the bottom-right by default: it usually holds floor, which is where buyers look for flooring condition and room size cues.
• Top-left tends to be safest in interiors: ceilings are less informative than floors, and top-left avoids windows on the right where light usually comes from.
• Check for mirrors. Bathrooms and hallways will reflect you and the phone into the shot, which looks amateurish and shows the rig.

Light and exposure

Interiors are the hardest thing a phone camera does, because a bright window against a dim room exceeds the sensor’s range.

Film during the brightest part of the day and turn every light on anyway. Mixed lighting reads warmer and more inviting than a dim room lit by one window.

Expose for the room, not the window. A blown-out window is normal and buyers ignore it. A dark room is a room that looks smaller than it is.

Watch your own exposure in the inset. Standing with a window behind you turns your half into a silhouette. Turn so the light is on your face, even if that means walking the room in a different order.

Audio in an empty property

Empty rooms are hard surfaces and no soft furnishings, which is the worst possible case for a phone microphone. Narration recorded in an empty living room sounds like it was recorded in a swimming pool.

A clip-on lavalier is the single highest-value purchase for property video, and it costs less than the photography for one listing.

Related

• Recording both cameras at once
• Storage planning for a full day of viewings