Most of the real estate video statistics circulating in 2026 cannot be traced to a study. The famous one, that listings with video get 403% more inquiries, leads back to a single sentence in a 2014 trade publication crediting an Australian listing portal, with no published methodology, no sample size and no date on the underlying research. Below is every real estate video number I could trace to a named source that discloses how it was collected, plus the ones I threw out and the reason.
Where the 403% number actually comes from
The earliest traceable published appearance I could find is an Inman article dated June 30, 2014. The sentence reads: "A study by international listing website Domain.com found that video increased listing inquiries by 403 percent." That is the whole citation. No link to a study, no sample size, no field period, no definition of what counts as an inquiry, and no year for the research itself.
I looked for the study. Domain is an Australian property portal, which is where the frequent secondhand attribution to an "Australian real estate group" comes from. There is no published document behind the figure that I could locate, and no methodology anyone has been able to point to in the twelve years since.
What makes it worth writing about is where it gets attributed now. Several of the pages currently ranking for real estate video statistics credit the 403% figure to the National Association of REALTORS, some of them citing a specific recent year. I searched NAR's own site for it. The number does not appear in NAR's published research. A statistic that traces to a 2014 trade article about an Australian portal is being laundered into a 2026 citation of the largest trade association in American real estate, and nobody downstream is checking.
Even if the original measurement was sound, think about what it would describe. Listings on one portal, in one country, at a time when the marketing channel for a property video was a page embed. Instagram Reels did not exist. TikTok did not exist. Treating that as a 2026 forecast for your listing is not a data-driven decision.
The statistics that survive a source check
Buyers rank video last among listing page features
NAR's 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers asks buyers to rate website features. Exhibit 3-8, titled Value of Website Features, gives the share calling each one very useful:
- Photos, 81%
- Detailed information about properties for sale, 77%
- Floor plans, 57%
- Real estate agent contact information, 44%
- Virtual tours, 38%
- Interactive maps and neighborhood information, in the low thirties
- Videos, 29%
Videos sit near the bottom, below virtual tours and well below floor plans. The methodology is disclosed: NAR mailed a 120 question survey in July 2025 to 173,250 recent home buyers and received 6,103 responses from primary residence buyers, covering purchases between July 2024 and June 2025.
This is the number the category does not quote, and it is the one with a sample size attached. It does not say video is worthless. It says buyers treat the photo set as the listing and everything else as supporting material, which is a useful thing to know before you spend four figures on a production.
Just over half of agents use drone photography or video
NAR's 2025 Technology Survey, released September 18, 2025, reports the technologies members actually use: eSignature at 79%, social media at 75%, drone photography and video at 52%, and AI generated content at 46%, mostly for listing descriptions. On AI adoption, 20% of members use it daily and 32% have never used it.
The 52% figure bundles drone and video together, so it is not a clean read on listing video alone. I am reporting it as what it is rather than splitting it into a video-only number the survey does not support.
Half of buyers find their home online
From the same 2025 Profile, Exhibit 3-6 gives where buyers first found the home they purchased: internet 52%, real estate agent 27%, friend or relative or neighbor 9%, yard sign or open house sign 4%, home builder or their agent 4%. Separately, 46% of buyers said their first step in the process was looking at properties online.
That pair of numbers carries more weight for a marketing decision than any inquiry-lift claim. The listing page is the storefront for half of all purchases, so what sits on it matters, whatever the ranking of individual features.
Zillow's 3D tour numbers are real and they are five years old
Zillow publishes two figures about its own 3D Home tours: listings with one sold on average 14% faster than listings without, and received on average 37% more views. Both come from Zillow's internal listing data rather than a survey. The 14% figure is explicitly labeled as covering January through July 2021. The views figure carries no stated period at all.
Zillow also reports that 61% of buyers agreed somewhat or completely that they wish more listings had 3D tours, from its Consumer Housing Trends Report 2021.
Two caveats that the pages quoting these numbers leave off. They are vendor data about the vendor's own feature, which is not disqualifying but is worth stating. And they are from 2021. I checked Zillow's 2025 Consumer Housing Trends Report for buyers, which surveyed roughly 10,200 successful buyers in April and September 2025, and it does not refresh the listing feature figures. So the best available Zillow number on tours is five years old, and anyone presenting it as current is not telling you that.
Staging is the best documented effect in listing marketing
NAR's 2025 Profile of Home Staging, published May 6, 2025, is what a properly disclosed study looks like: 1,266 usable responses from 49,806 REALTORS invited, a 2.5% response rate, and a stated margin of error of plus or minus 2.75% at the 95% confidence level. The findings include 49% of sellers' agents observing that staging reduced time on market, 29% of agents reporting a 1% to 10% increase in the dollar value offered, and 83% of buyers' agents saying staging helped buyers envision the home as their own. Median cost was $1,500 when a professional staged it.
Those are agent perceptions rather than a controlled price experiment, and the report is clear about that. It is still the strongest evidence base in listing marketing, which is why it is worth reading alongside what the data actually says about staging before deciding where your marketing budget goes.
What I dropped, and why
Four claims that appear on most competing pages are missing from this one on purpose.
- "73% of homeowners are more likely to list with an agent who uses video." Usually credited to NAR. It does appear on nar.realtor, in a magazine article that attributes it to a PDF from a marketing vendor rather than to NAR research. It is not in the Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, whose relevant finding is that 29% of buyers call videos very useful. A trade association republishing a vendor claim is not the association measuring it.
- "Listings with video get 157% more organic search traffic." Traces back to a claim from Brightcove, a video hosting company, about video marketing in general. There is no real estate study behind it and no methodology published with it.
- "Homes marketed with video sell for 6% more." I could not find a study, MLS dataset or academic paper supporting a price premium attributable to video. If one exists with a disclosed method, it is not findable from the pages citing the number.
- Every published cost-per-lead and cost-per-click benchmark for real estate video ads. The tables exist, but none of the ones I checked disclose account count, sample size or date range, so the numbers cannot be compared to your own.
There is also no independent study of days on market for listings with video versus without, controlled for price band and market. Several pages imply one exists. I looked and did not find it.
The honest version of the argument for listing video
Half of buyers find the home online. The photo set does most of the work. Video is a secondary asset that a minority of buyers call very useful, and no verifiable study shows it moves sale price.
That reads like an argument against video until you look at what it costs now. The old case for a listing video had to justify $500 to $1,500 for a videographer against a vague inquiry-lift claim, and that is why the inflated statistics existed. They were doing the work a weak ROI case could not do. When production cost drops far enough, the justification stops needing a miracle number.
On ShowcaseVideos.ai the accounting is visible before you render. You paste a Zillow or Redfin listing URL, which is the import we support, and the photos come across, up to 30 per job. A base render is 18 credits and covers the widescreen cut at roughly two minutes, the address and price lower-third, library music and hosting. AI camera motion on a hero shot bills per clip at the current model's rate, 7 credits for a five second clip. Virtual staging is 1 credit per room. A vertical cut for Reels adds 6 and a square feed cut adds 4, both at 45 seconds, and those two formats sit on the Office plan and above rather than the $59 Agent tier. The studio shows the total before you commit, and nothing is deducted until you press render. The first video is free and does not ask for a card, carrying a small watermark that activating a plan removes. If you want the arithmetic rather than the pitch, the credit breakdown is on the pricing page.
At that price the question stops being whether video produces 403% more inquiries and becomes whether the listing page looks like the agent cared. For a fuller treatment of that calculation, see the business case for a listing video, and for what separates the tools, the buying guide for AI real estate video generators covers the feature differences that matter.
How to check a real estate statistic in two minutes
The test that caught every bad number above is short enough to run on any stat before you put it in a listing presentation.
- Find the named collector, then look for the figure on that organization's own site. A number attributed to NAR should be on nar.realtor.
- Check the date of the underlying research, not the date of the blog post quoting it. Pages routinely stamp 2026 on a 2014 figure.
- Look for a sample size and a field period. A study that discloses neither is a marketing claim.
- Ask who benefits. Vendor data about the vendor's own product can still be accurate, but it should be labeled.
- Follow the citation chain backward until it stops. If it terminates in another blog post, you have found the end of the evidence.
Frequently asked questions
Is the statistic that listings with video get 403% more inquiries true?
There is no verifiable study behind it. The earliest traceable published attribution is a June 2014 Inman article crediting an Australian listing portal, with no methodology, sample size or date given, and the figure does not appear in NAR's published research despite frequently being credited to NAR.
What percentage of home buyers find listing videos useful?
In NAR's 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 29% of buyers rated videos very useful, compared with 81% for photos, 57% for floor plans and 38% for virtual tours. That survey drew 6,103 responses from buyers who purchased between July 2024 and June 2025.
Do homes with video sell faster?
No independent study establishes this. The closest verifiable figure is Zillow's own report that listings with a 3D Home tour sold on average 14% faster, which is vendor data on a different feature and covers January through July 2021.
How many real estate agents use video?
NAR's 2025 Technology Survey found 52% of members use drone photography and video, a combined category rather than a video-only figure. Social media use was 75% and AI generated content 46%.
Where do buyers actually find the home they purchase?
NAR's 2025 Profile puts the internet at 52% and a real estate agent at 27%, with friends, relatives and neighbors at 9% and yard signs at 4%. A further 46% of buyers said searching online was their first step in the process.
Why do so many real estate video statistics turn out to be unsourced?
Marketing pages cite each other rather than primary research, so a figure with no study behind it can circulate for a decade and pick up more authoritative-sounding attributions along the way. Following the citation chain backward until it stops is usually enough to spot it.