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Why cinematic video is becoming the standard for real estate listings
By Flare Department
A property photo used to be enough to get someone through the door. Increasingly, it isn’t. Buyers now expect to feel a space before they ever visit it, and get the sense of what living there would actually be like. While good real estate photography can do that, video adds what a photo can’t: movement, pacing, and the feeling of actually walking through. Across the industry, cinematic real estate video production is shifting from a nice-to-have for the top 1% of listings to something closer to a baseline expectation, and the shift is happening for reasons that, for us, are worth understanding rather than just following.
From the top of the market to everywhere else
Video took hold in the luxury market first, where the realistic buyer pool for a listing might be a few dozen people scattered across countries and time zones. Footage had to do some of the persuading a viewing normally would. Firms like Christie’s International Real Estate and Sotheby’s International Realty leaned into cinematic property video for exactly that reason. But the expectation hasn’t stayed at the top of the market. Buyers at every price point now house-hunt the same way they scroll through everything else, on a phone, expecting video. That habit hasn’t stayed on social media; it’s carried straight into how homes are expected to be presented.
And that expectation keeps climbing. New creative formats and storytelling angles keep pushing the standard further, and buyers notice the difference. It’s why we work across a real range ourselves, from elevated cinematic reveals to something closer to documentary storytelling, rather than settling on one approach.
Documentary storytelling: Broersma’s “At Home With”
At one end sits documentary-style storytelling This approach is about real people with a real narrative. The property becomes a supporting character rather than the subject. Broersma’s “At Home With” series is a good example from our recent work. One episode follows Jan Arie Dekker through his converted church loft in Amsterdam-Zuid, designed by George Witteveen. It was built as editorial content, not a listing video, and it received coverage in Quote and De Telegraaf, which is well outside where real estate content usually lands. That’s the clearest evidence we’ve seen that this kind of work doesn’t just perform better with buyers. Done well, it breaks out of real estate coverage entirely.
The cinematic reveal: SAOTA’s villas in Mallorca
At the other end sits the cinematic reveal: architecture-led, sensory, built to sell a feeling rather than follow a person. For Interior Architects Grand&Johnson, we shot two videos for two SAOTA-designed villas in Mallorca. Both residences shared the same architectural language, and the films needed to feel connected while also working as a standalone piece. The shots are smooth and unhurried, focused on materiality, light, and form — a terrace door sliding open, water falling over an infinity pool — matched to sound design and music that carries the atmosphere of each film.
Different projects call for different formats. What they share is treating the property as something with a story to tell, rather than a set of rooms to document.
Even Funda is rewriting the rules
This shift isn’t just aesthetic, either. Platforms are starting to build it into how listings get seen at all. Funda, the Netherlands’ dominant listing site, is overhauling its entire presentation system in September 2026, introducing three tiers — Bronze, Silver, and Gold — with video and 360° tours reserved for the Silver and Gold packages rather than the free base tier. Listings without video aren’t just less compelling under the new system; they’re structurally deprioritized in Funda’s own ranking. What used to be a differentiator is becoming a gate.
It comes down to craft
None of this means every listing needs a five-minute cinematic production. It means the difference between a video that checks a box and one that actually moves someone is no longer a nice distinction — it’s becoming the whole game. That gap is craft: patience with light, a real sense of pacing, and a team that understands why a space was designed the way it was, not just how to expose for a bright room. It’s the same standard our team of photographers and filmmakers holds itself to on a photography brief, applied to a medium that rewards it even more.
Interested in cinematic video production for your next real estate project? Explore our real estate services or see our approach to video or get in touch to discuss what’s possible for your listing.