Real Estate Video Statistics 2026: Every Number With Its Source

Real estate video statistics for 2026 come from a handful of publishers, and most of the newest editions were measured in 2025: the National Association of Realtors’ 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers (released November 2025), Zillow’s Consumer Housing Trends Report for Agents (December 2025), Pew Research Center’s Americans’ Social Media Use 2025 (November 2025), HubSpot’s 2026 State of Marketing and NAR’s 2026 Technology Report (September 2026). This page collects only the figures we could read on the publisher’s own page, with the year each was measured and a link beside the number.

The short version: 43% of buyers start their search online and 51% find the home they buy there; 41% of online buyers rate virtual tours “very useful” and 29% say the same of videos; 48% of buyers’ agents say video is important to their clients; 75% of sellers are more likely to hire an agent who offers virtual tours and interactive floor plans; and 49% of marketers name short-form video as their highest-ROI format. The sections below give the source for each, a note on what it means for a listing, and a list of popular statistics we could not trace to any publisher.

How to read these real estate video stats

Three rules apply to every number here. The year is the year the data was collected, not the year an article quoted it — NAR’s buyer profile covers transactions from July 2024 to June 2025, so there is no “2026 buyer survey” yet. The publisher is named and linked where the number appears. And a popular number with no publisher page behind it goes in the last section, not in the body.

Buyer behavior: how people search for homes

NAR’s 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers (released November 4, 2025; 6,103 responses from buyers who purchased between July 2024 and June 2025) reports that first-time buyers fell to 21% of all buyers, the lowest share since the series began in 1981, and that the median first-time buyer is now 40 years old, with repeat buyers at a median of 62. In the same report, 88% of buyers purchased through an agent or broker, 91% of sellers used an agent, and the typical buyer searched for 10 weeks. NAR’s top-ten takeaways from the same edition add that all-cash buyers held at an all-time high of 26% and that for-sale-by-owner deals dropped to 5%.

The detailed search-process tables are published in NAR’s 2025 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends Report (April 2025; 5,390 responses covering transactions from July 2023 to June 2024). The first step for 43% of buyers was looking online for properties for sale; 21% contacted an agent first. Asked which information sources they used, 86% named a real estate agent, 69% a mobile or tablet search device, 49% open houses, 37% an online video site and 32% yard signs. Where did they find the home they actually bought? The internet for 51% of buyers and a real estate agent for 29%.

The same report ranks website features by the share of online buyers who called them “very useful”: photos 83%, detailed property information 79%, floor plans 57%, agent contact information 47%, virtual tours 41%, neighborhood information 35%, videos 29%, virtual open houses 11% and virtual listing appointments 10%.

What this means for a listing: half of buyers find their home online and the first thing they judge is the photo set, so video is an addition to strong photos, not a substitute. Virtual tours outrank video on usefulness, which is why a tour, walkthrough or AI clip decision should be made per listing rather than by habit.

Video, photos and tours in listings

NAR’s 2025 Profile of Home Staging (1,266 Realtor responses collected in February 2025) asked agents how important listing media is to their clients. Among buyers’ agents, photos (73%), traditional physical staging (57%), videos (48%) and virtual tours (43%) were “much more or more important” to clients. Among sellers’ agents the ranking was photos 88%, videos 47% and physical staging 43%, and 76% of sellers’ agents recommend professional photos as a pre-listing improvement.

Zillow’s Consumer Housing Trends Report for Agents (announced December 30, 2025) found that 78% of sellers were more likely to hire an agent who offers high-resolution photography and 75% were more likely to hire one who provides virtual tours and interactive floor plans. Zillow’s 2025 agent report PDF (fielded March to July 2024) adds that 86% of buyers said they were more likely to view a home if the listing included a floor plan they liked.

Portal-side engagement data is scarcer and older. Zillow’s own 3D Home data sheet states that listings with a 3D Home tour got, on average, 37% more views and 46% more saves on Zillow, based on data collected from January to July 2021. That is interactive tours rather than video, and it is a 2021 measurement, so cite it with its date.

On the supply side, NAR’s 2025 Realtors Technology Survey (July 2025; 1,241 responses) found 52% of Realtors using drone photography or video, 38% using virtual tours and 4% using VR walkthroughs. NAR’s 2026 Technology Report (September 22, 2026) lists drone photography or video at 48%, social media scheduling and content tools at 32% and virtual tours at 29%.

What this means for a listing: agents on both sides rank photos first and video second, and sellers now expect tours and floor plans from the agent they hire. Fewer than a third of Realtors publish virtual tours, so a listing that carries photos, a floor plan and a short video is still in the minority. Our real estate video cost guide covers what each option costs per listing.

How buyers and sellers find their agent

Zillow’s December 2025 agent report announcement says 36% of sellers now find their agent through online channels, more than double the 15% share in 2018, and 33% of buyers say online research played a key role in choosing their agent. It also found that 47% of buyers and 59% of sellers hired the first agent they spoke with, and that 50% of buyers who used an agent prefer texting or messaging apps, while 33% prefer phone calls.

The earlier 2025 agent report PDF (fielded 2024) breaks down where buyers first found the agent they hired: a real estate website or app 23%, a friend or family referral 22%, a social network 7% and a search engine 7%. Among prospective buyers, 44% said they were more likely to hire an agent who is active on social media, 46% said it makes no difference, and the split ran from 51% of millennials to 18% of Baby Boomer and Silent Generation buyers.

From the agent’s side, NAR’s 2025 Technology Survey found 75% of Realtors using social media, and social media was the top lead-generating technology at 39% of respondents, ahead of CRM software (23%) and the local MLS (17%).

What this means for a listing: the listing video is also an agent advertisement. A third of sellers find their agent online, and the buyers most likely to reward a social presence are the millennials who are now the largest first-time cohort, so every clip should carry the agent’s name where the platform allows it.

Social platform reach in the U.S. (Pew, 2025)

Pew Research Center’s Americans’ Social Media Use 2025 (released November 20, 2025; 5,022 U.S. adults surveyed February 5 to June 18, 2025) found that 84% of U.S. adults use YouTube, 71% Facebook, 50% Instagram, 37% TikTok, 32% WhatsApp, 26% Reddit and 25% Snapchat. TikTok use has grown from 21% of adults in 2021 to 37%, and Instagram from 40% to 50% over the same period, while YouTube and Facebook have been stable.

Frequency comes from a separate Pew survey of 5,123 adults (February 24 to March 2, 2025) in the same report: 52% of U.S. adults visit Facebook daily and 48% visit YouTube daily, including 37% and 33% who do so several times a day; 24% are daily TikTok users and 10% use X daily. Pew’s social media fact sheet carries the same figures with demographic breakdowns.

What this means for a listing: YouTube and Facebook are where the widest share of buyers and sellers already are, so a listing clip belongs there even if it was made for Reels or TikTok. Our guide to real estate video for Instagram and TikTok covers the short vertical formats.

Video marketing at large (2026 editions)

HubSpot’s marketing statistics page, citing its 2026 State of Marketing report, ranks short-form video as the highest-ROI content format for 49% of marketers, ahead of long-form video (29%) and live-streaming video (25%). The same page reports that 93% of marketers call video an important part of their strategy, 37% plan to increase video investment in 2026, and about 94% plan to use AI in content creation. It also summarizes Wyzowl’s 2026 edition of its annual video survey: 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool and 82% of video marketers report a good ROI.

Inside real estate, NAR’s 2026 Technology Report (September 22, 2026) found 23% of Realtors using AI daily and 25% weekly, with only 12% not using it and having no plans to, down from 32% who had not tried AI in 2025. Writing listing descriptions is the top use case, cited by 75% of AI users; 56% of Realtors use AI to create social media posts and 52% to draft emails and follow-ups; and 81% said saving time is their primary reason for adopting new technology, up from 66% a year earlier.

What this means for a listing: the general marketing world has already moved its budget to short vertical video, and agents are adopting AI for text faster than for media. Video made from listing photos is where those two trends meet; the 2026 real estate video marketing plan explains how to use it by funnel stage.

Twelve key figures at a glance

Statistics we could not verify

These numbers appear in many real estate video stats round-ups. We looked for the publisher’s own page for each and could not find one, so they are not used above.

• “Listings with video receive 403% more inquiries.” Usually attributed to an Australian property portal, always without a link to the portal’s own research, and typically to a claim made more than a decade ago. We could not find any publisher page that states it, its method or its year.
• “73% of homeowners are more likely to list with an agent who uses video.” This is often presented as NAR research. The only NAR page we found carrying it is a 2020 magazine article that attributes the figure to a third-party vendor’s broker report, not to an NAR survey, and the vendor’s original data is not published with a year or a sample.
• “Homes with 3D tours sell 10–14% faster and get 60% more views.” These are attributed to Zillow on third-party pages. The only Zillow-published engagement figures we found are the 37% more views and 46% more saves from January to July 2021 cited above; we found no Zillow page stating a days-on-market effect.
• “X% of buyers watch a video before visiting a home.” NAR measures whether buyers used an online video site (37%) and found videos very useful (29%); it does not ask about watching before a showing, so numbers phrased that way come from an unnamed source.

Real estate video statistics 2026: the bottom line

The real estate video statistics for 2026 that can be sourced tell a consistent story: about half of buyers find their home online (51%), photos are what they judge first (83% “very useful”), virtual tours (41%) and videos (29%) add to that rather than replace it, both buyers’ agents (48%) and sellers’ agents (47%) say video matters to clients, and sellers now prefer agents who bring tours and floor plans (75%). Outside real estate, short-form video is the highest-ROI format for 49% of marketers and YouTube reaches 84% of U.S. adults. Quote those with their publisher and year, and leave the 403% and 73% claims out until someone publishes the study behind them.