Open House Promotion: The 72-Hour Video Countdown Plan
Do the video work once, three days before the door opens, and then release it in five scheduled pieces. That is the plan. One render of your listing photos produces every asset you need between Thursday afternoon and Sunday evening, and each piece has a fixed time, a fixed platform and a caption shape you can reuse on the next listing.
Most open house promotion fails for a boring reason. The agent posts once, the day before, at whatever hour they happen to be free. A single post on a Saturday night reaches the people already scrolling on a Saturday night. A countdown reaches them four separate times, and the last touch lands on the morning they could actually walk in the door.
Here is the calendar, written for a Sunday open house from 1:00 to 3:00 pm. Shift the clock if yours runs Saturday.
Wednesday evening: one render, five assets
Everything in the next 72 hours comes out of a single job. Paste the Zillow or Redfin listing URL into the studio and it pulls the gallery for that one property, up to 30 photos. Zillow and Redfin listing URLs are what the importer supports, so if your listing lives somewhere else you upload the photos directly instead.
What comes back is a widescreen hero cut at roughly 127 seconds with the address and price lower-third already burned in, plus whatever social cuts you asked for. The vertical 9:16 cut and the square 1:1 cut both render at 45 seconds, which is the length that actually holds on a phone. The mechanics of getting a good render out of a photo set are covered in the guide to turning listing photos into a cinematic video, so this post stays on the release schedule rather than the production.
Two production notes that matter for a countdown specifically.
First, order the photos the way the house reads in person. The render follows your sequence, so the exterior should open, the room the house is bought on should sit early enough to survive a 15 second cut, and the garage can go last where nobody trims it out by accident.
Second, render on Wednesday rather than Saturday. A finished video stays editable for 30 days, and a re-render inside that window costs only the render fee rather than the whole job again. Wednesday gives you three days to notice the kitchen shot is crooked and fix it cheaply.
What the render costs
The base render is 18 credits, which covers the 16:9 cut at about 127 seconds, the director chat, library music and hosting. AI camera motion is billed per clip at the current model rate, 7 credits for a five second clip on Kling 2.5 turbo pro. The automatic motion count is two fifths of your photo count, so a 20 photo listing gets 8 animated shots and a full 30 photo listing gets 12. You can push it higher by hand, up to every photo in the job, if the house deserves it.
The extras are small. Virtual staging runs 1 credit per room. An AI composed original score is 4 credits, and the curated library music is free. The vertical cut adds 6 credits and the square cut adds 4.
One thing to check before you build a plan around vertical video: the 9:16 and 1:1 cuts sit on the Office tier and above. The Agent plan at $59 a month delivers landscape only. If your whole countdown lives in Stories and Reels, that is the line that decides which plan you need, and it is worth knowing on Wednesday rather than Saturday night.
Thursday 1:00 pm: the teaser
Seventy two hours out, post a 15 second vertical cut. Exterior, two rooms, nothing else. No address in the caption yet.
The teaser is doing one job, which is to get the listing into the feeds of people who follow you but have no idea a new house exists. It works better without the full information because a half answered question travels further than a complete one. Caption shape: the neighborhood, one specific detail, the date.
Something like: "Something opens in Fairview this Sunday. The kitchen island is nine feet long. 1:00 to 3:00."
Post it to Reels and to your Stories at the same time. If you already run a working system for posting listing Reels, the teaser slots into it as a normal listing Reel with a date attached.
Friday 5:30 pm: the full walkthrough
Forty eight hours out, post the 45 second vertical cut in full, with the address in the caption and the open house time as the last line. Friday evening is when people plan a weekend, and this is the post that gets saved and sent to a spouse.
Give this one a real caption. Three or four sentences on what the house is actually like to stand in, written the way you would say it on the phone. Square footage and bedroom counts are already on the portal, and repeating them here wastes the only sentences anyone reads.
Post the same 45 second file to Facebook as a Reel, and to your local Facebook groups if the group rules allow listings. The square 1:1 cut is the one to use if you are also running a paid boost, because it holds more vertical space in a feed than landscape and costs less to render than the vertical.
Saturday 6:00 pm: the countdown
Twenty four hours out, the asset changes shape. This is not another walkthrough. It is a single still frame pulled from the video with the address, the time and the words nobody has said yet, posted to Stories only.
Keep it in Stories rather than the feed. A countdown in the permanent feed sits there looking stale for weeks after the house sells. A Story expires on its own the morning of the open house, which is exactly when it should.
Saturday evening is also when you send the listing to your actual database rather than to strangers. A one line email with the video embedded and the time in the subject line will outperform every social post in the plan on a per recipient basis, and it takes about four minutes to write.
Sunday 9:00 am: the doors open reminder
Four hours out, post the shortest thing you will make all week. A seven second clip of the front exterior, the time, and nothing else. Stories only again.
This post exists for one narrow group of people, which is everyone who saw the Friday post, meant to come, and has not thought about it since. That group is larger than it sounds. Sunday morning is the last moment their day is still unplanned.
Sunday 4:00 pm: the recap
An hour after the door closes, post the full landscape cut to the feed with a caption aimed at the people who did not come. Missed it, here is the house, message me for a private showing.
This is the post most agents skip, and it is the one with the longest tail. The open house ends. The video keeps working on Zillow, in your MLS listing where your board allows it, and in every conversation you have about the property for the next month. The broader question of where a finished cut should live is worked through in the guide to distributing a listing video across MLS, Zillow, social and ads.
What to cut when you are short on time
If you get the listing on Friday and the open house is Sunday, run three posts instead of five. Keep Friday's full walkthrough, Saturday's countdown and Sunday morning's reminder. Drop the Thursday teaser, which has nowhere to go, and drop the recap only if you truly have nothing left.
If you have one hour total, keep the Friday walkthrough and the Sunday morning reminder. Those two carry most of the attendance. Everything else in this plan is compounding rather than load bearing.
What the video is actually doing here
Worth being straight about this, because the category oversells it. In Zillow's Consumer Housing Trends Report 2025, video ranked as the most important listing feature for 4% of prospective buyers, up from 3% the year before. A 3D or virtual tour ranked third at 20%, up from 18%. Video is not what makes somebody buy a house.
What it does is fill the room. The same Zillow report found that 41% of prospective buyers had attended an open house or a private home tour in the past year, and that repeat buyers did so at a higher rate than first timers, 43% against 34%. Open house attendance is a live behavior, and the countdown is a tool for converting scroll into attendance. Judge the plan on how many people walk in, not on views.
The other reason to run the countdown has nothing to do with this listing. Sellers in your farm area watch how you market other people's houses. Five scheduled posts across three days is a visible standard, and it is the kind of thing that gets mentioned in a listing appointment eight months later.
Reusing the plan on the next listing
The whole point of fixing the schedule is that the second listing takes fifteen minutes instead of an afternoon. Save the five caption shapes in a note, keep the posting times as recurring calendar blocks on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and the only new work per listing is pasting a URL and reordering photos.
Credits carry across quiet weeks too. Plan credits roll over for two months and credits you buy as a top up never expire, so a month with one listing is not a month of wasted allowance. If you want to work out which tier matches your listing volume, the credit costs and plan allowances are laid out on the pricing page, and the first video is free with no card required.
Frequently asked questions
How far in advance should I promote an open house?
Start 72 hours out. Earlier than that and the post gets buried before the date arrives, later and you miss the Friday evening window when people plan a weekend. Three days gives you four touches without repeating yourself.
What should an open house teaser video actually show?
The exterior and two rooms, cut to about 15 seconds, with no address. The teaser is there to raise a question rather than answer it. Save the full walkthrough and the address for the Friday post.
Do I need a separate video for Reels and for Facebook?
No. The same 45 second vertical file works as an Instagram Reel and as a Facebook Reel. You need a different aspect ratio only for the feed post and for paid placements, which is what the 1:1 square cut is for.
Is an open house video worth making if only a few people show up?
Yes, because the video outlives the event. The recap post, the MLS listing where your board allows video, and every private showing conversation over the following month all run on the same file. Attendance is one use of it rather than the only one.
How much does one open house video cost to make from listing photos?
The base render is 18 credits for the widescreen cut with the address lower-third, library music and hosting. Camera motion is billed per clip at 7 credits on the current default model, virtual staging is 1 credit per room, the vertical social cut adds 6 and the square adds 4. Your first video costs nothing, does not ask for a card, and carries a small watermark that activating a plan removes.