Instagram Reel Specs for Real Estate (2026)

An Instagram Reel for a listing is 1080 by 1920 pixels at 9:16, runs 20 to 40 seconds, and keeps all text out of the top 250 and bottom 420 pixels where the interface sits. Burn the captions in, because most feed viewing is muted, and pick a cover frame that reads as a property at thumbnail size.

Specs are the least interesting part of video and the most expensive to get wrong, because the failure is invisible to you and obvious to everyone else. Your video looks correct in your editor and arrives on someone's phone with the price cropped off behind the caption bar. This page is the numbers, in one place, so you can stop looking them up.

The dimensions

• Resolution: 1080 by 1920 pixels.
• Aspect ratio: 9:16. A 4:5 or square video will be letterboxed with bars.
• Frame rate: 30 fps is standard. 60 fps is accepted and rarely worth the file size for property video.
• File type: MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio.
• Maximum length: up to 3 minutes for a Reel, but see the section below on why that is not the target.

The safe zones, which is where most agents lose the price

Instagram draws its own interface on top of your video: the profile name and audio strip along the bottom, the action buttons down the right side, and the top bar. Anything you place there is covered. The working rule is to keep text and logos out of the top 250 pixels and the bottom 420 pixels of the 1920 pixel canvas, and clear of roughly the right 120 pixels.

That leaves a comfortable middle band of about 1250 pixels of height for anything that has to be read. Address, price, beds and baths all belong there. The single most common mistake in listing reels is a price lower third sitting at the natural bottom third position, which is exactly where the caption bar lands.

How long should a listing Reel be?

Twenty to forty seconds. Instagram allows up to three minutes, and the temptation is to use it because the house has more rooms than forty seconds allows. Resist it. Feed algorithms weight completion, and a fully watched thirty second reel sends a stronger signal than a ninety second one that loses half its viewers at the second bedroom.

The arithmetic is straightforward. At roughly four seconds a shot, forty seconds is ten rooms, which is a complete tour of most homes. If you have twenty five photos you are not choosing a length, you are choosing which ten tell the story. The per platform breakdown is in how long a real estate video should be, and the photo count question in how many photos you need.

Captions, and why burned beats automatic

Instagram offers automatic captions and they are decent. Burn your own in anyway. Automatic captions can be switched off by the viewer, they are not always shown in every surface the reel appears in, and they cannot be styled to stay inside your safe zone. Burned captions are part of the video and behave identically everywhere it is reposted, including on other platforms.

There is an accessibility argument too, and it is not a small one. A burned caption serves a viewer with hearing loss whether or not the platform's feature is enabled, which is the difference between a listing that is accessible and one that is accessible when conditions are right.

The cover frame decides your grid

The cover is chosen separately from the first frame, and it is doing a different job. The first frame has to stop a scroll. The cover has to make sense as a small square in your profile grid, next to your other posts, to someone deciding whether to follow you.

• Pick a room, not a title card. Text is unreadable at grid size.
• Favour a wide, bright shot over a detail. Detail shots read as noise when small.
• Keep the composition consistent across listings so your grid reads as one body of work.

Exporting without doing it by hand

Every number on this page is a setting you can hit in any editor, and hitting them per listing per platform is the part that stops people posting. PropReel exports the 9:16 Reel with captions inside the safe zone as part of one vertical render (Instagram Reel, TikTok and WhatsApp Story); on a paid plan the horizontal set, including a branding free MLS cut, is one more video. The platform specs are covered in the video formats every listing needs.

Whatever you use, the test is the same: post it, open it on a phone, and check that the price is still visible. The first video is free if you want to run that test today.