Every figure on this page links to the organization that produced it, and each was re-checked against that source before publishing. How many homes are sold, what buyers actually look at in a listing, how many agents use video and drone footage, how many listings carry a 3D tour, who shoots and edits this work, and where the famous real estate video numbers really came from.
4,746,000 homes, new and existing, were bought as primary residences in the United States in 2024, 84% of all home purchases. (NAR)See details
83% of home buyers who searched online rate listing photos very useful; 29% say the same of listing videos, 10th of the 14 website features NAR asks about. (NAR Generational Trends, 2024 survey)See details
48% of REALTORS® said they use drone photography or video in NAR's 2026 technology report, while 12% of sellers say their agent used video. (NAR)See details
That is a 36-percentage-point gap between what agents report using and what sellers report seeing. (Our calculation)See details
43% of REALTORS® hire a professional to operate a drone; 7% fly one themselves. (NAR Member Profile, 2023)See details
11% of new for-sale listings on Zillow carry its rich media, which includes 3D tours and interactive floor plans, and about 5% carry Showcase. (Zillow Group)See details
5% of buyers in August 2026 bought a home without ever physically visiting it. (NAR REALTORS® Confidence Index)See details
REA Group measures 43% more inspection requests for listings with a video on realestate.com.au. (REA Group, second half of 2025)See details
The '73% of homeowners' claim credited to NAR originates with a vendor selling agent websites, and NAR's own page links the figure to that vendor's PDF. (Properties Online; NAR)See details
The '68% faster with aerial photos' claim traces to a 2016 blog caption citing unnamed MLS statistics; the only study with a stated method found 32% faster, for professional photography. (RISMedia; VHT Studios)See details
U.S. real estate employs 560 photographers on payroll across the whole sector; set against brokerage-office jobs alone, that is one for every 604. (BLS; our calculation)See details
BLS counts 2.8 times as many photographers in total as it finds on establishment payrolls, because two thirds are self-employed. (BLS; our calculation)See details
How many homes are sold in the United States each year?
The National Association of REALTORS® reports that 4,746,000 homes, new and existing, were bought as primary residences in the United States in 2024, 84% of all home purchases that year; the other 16% were not bought to live in. Existing homes are almost all of the market: NAR states they account for more than 90% of total home sales, and in August 2026 they were selling at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.98 million on NAR's monthly release. New single-family houses ran at 676,000 a year in September 2026 on the Census Bureau and HUD joint release, which counted 678,000 sold across the whole of 2025.
Those sales are the market every listing-media number on this page describes. Each of them is a property someone had to photograph, describe and publish, usually within days. The median existing home spent 31 days on the market in August 2026, so the window in which listing media has to exist at all is short.
Prices are close between the two markets: $429,100 median for an existing home in August 2026, $417,400 for a new one across 2025. Inventory was 1.62 million unsold existing homes at the end of August 2026, equal to 4.9 months' supply, and first-time buyers were 30% of sales that month.
Who markets those homes
Nearly all of them go through an agent. 88% of buyers and 91% of sellers used one in NAR's 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, the seller share equal to the highest on record, while for-sale-by-owner transactions fell to 5%.
NAR counted 1,438,569 members in its 2026 Member Profile, and its profile of real estate firms puts their number at more than 300,000. The typical member working individually closed nine transaction sides in 2025 with a median gross income of $59,200, and 86% are independent contractors at their firm. That last figure is the one that decides who pays for listing media: an independent contractor buys their own marketing, listing by listing, out of a median income under sixty thousand dollars.
Two BLS counts of the same occupation disagree for a reason worth knowing. The establishment survey found 193,370 real estate sales agents and 46,100 brokers on payrolls in May 2025. The Employment Projections program, which counts the self-employed as well, puts sales agents at 427,000 and brokers at 103,500 in the same year, and projects agents to grow 1.7 percent through 2035. The payroll survey sees under half the occupation, because most of it is self-employed.
What do home buyers actually look at in a listing?
Photos, first and by a wide margin. Among buyers who used the internet in their 2024 search, 83% rated listing photos a very useful website feature in NAR's Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends Report. Videos ranked 10th of the 14 website features NAR asks about, at 29%, below floor plans and virtual tours; photos were rated very useful by 2.9 times as many buyers as video (our calculation). The table shows five of the 14 rows.
Website feature
Rated "very useful"
Photos
83%
Detailed information about properties for sale
79%
Floor plans
57%
Virtual tours
41%
Videos
29%
NAR lists videos and virtual tours as two separate features, and buyers score them differently. Anyone quoting a single "video" number for real estate should say which of the two they mean, because a walkthrough tour and an edited listing film are not the same product and NAR has never measured them together.
The virtual tour figure has a history. It peaked at 58% of buyers calling tours very useful in 2020, in NAR's Real Estate in a Digital Age report, and has fallen back since. The same report is where NAR's benchmark 97% — the share of buyers who used the internet in their search — comes from.
Video does better as a place buyers go than as a feature they rate. 37% of buyers used an online video site as an information source in 2024, and the highest use of any age band was not the youngest: 45% of buyers aged 70 to 78 used one, against lower shares among buyers in their thirties.
Online search is also how buyers find the house itself. 51% found the home they bought on the internet in 2024, ahead of a real estate agent at 29% and a friend or relative at 8% in the same year's Profile (51% there as well). That share rises to 63% among buyers aged 26 to 34 and falls to 28% among buyers aged 79 to 99. Looking online was the first step for 43% of buyers, against 21% whose first step was contacting an agent.
How much of the search happens on a screen is easy to overstate and easy to understate. Buyers viewed a median of seven homes in 2024 and two of those seven were viewed online only, never in person. In August 2026, 5% of buyers bought on the strength of a virtual tour, showing or open house without ever physically visiting the property, according to NAR's REALTORS® Confidence Index. So remote media replaces roughly two of seven viewings and closes about one sale in twenty.
Two figures from Zillow point the same way, and come from a company that sells listing media, which is worth stating plainly. In Zillow's 2023 survey, 74% of prospective buyers agreed 3D tours give a better feel for a home's space than static photos, and 70% said they wish more listings had them. An earlier Zillow release reported that 56% of buyers agreed they had wasted time viewing properties they would have skipped had a floor plan been available. Zillow published no sample size for the first two, and fielded the third between March and August 2021.
How many real estate agents use video?
NAR does not publish that number, and the absence is the finding. Its 2025 REALTORS® Technology Survey lists fifteen technologies and has no standalone line for video. The closest categories are drone photography/video, used by 52% of members, which bundles stills and motion together and cannot be split, and virtual tours at 38%. Above both sit eSignature at 79% and social media at 75%; AI-generated content, such as listing descriptions, has already reached 46%.
NAR's 2026 REALTORS® Technology Report, released September 22, 2026, puts drone photography/video at 48%, behind the MLS at 96%, e-signature at 79%, showing-scheduling tools and pricing tools; AI-generated content is at 41%. Its public summary lists only those top seven tools, without social media or virtual tours, and the full report is sold in NAR's store, so the chart below stays on the 2025 survey, the latest edition whose whole list is public. NAR doesn't say whether the 2026 answer list matches 2025's, so the move from 52% to 48% is a change in the answers, not yet a trend.
The five technologies REALTORS® use mostShare of NAR members who use each technology in their real estate business, from the 2025 REALTORS® Technology Survey by the National Association of REALTORS® (surveyed July 2025). These are the top five of the fifteen technologies NAR listed. NAR has no separate line for video: drone photography/video bundles stills and motion.
Immersive formats are rare on the same survey. Virtual reality walkthroughs reach 4% of members and augmented reality tools 2%, while 88 percent had not actively tried either in the previous twelve months. Asked which technologies delivered the most quality leads, 39% named social media, ahead of CRM at 23% and the local MLS at 17%; a listing portal such as realtor.com® was named by 9%. Technology spending is modest: 36% of members spent $50 to $250 a month on it in total in 2026, across every tool they use (34% in 2025).
The only video percentage NAR prints anywhere comes from the other side of the transaction. In its table of marketing methods sellers say their agent used, for homes sold between July 2023 and June 2024, video appears at 12%.
Marketing method the seller's agent used
Share of sellers
Multiple Listing Service website
86%
Yard sign
61%
Open house
58%
Social networking sites (Facebook, Instagram)
22%
Virtual tours
16%
Video
12%
Virtual open house
4%
Video hosting websites
2%
Put the two surveys beside each other and there is a 36-percentage-point gap (our calculation) between the 48% of agents who said in 2026 that they use drone photography or video and the 12% of sellers who say their agent used video. The two are not measuring the same thing: different populations, different years, and one of them bundles stills with motion. So the gap is a bound rather than a contradiction. It is still the most useful single number on this page: whatever share of agents use the capability, far fewer listings end up with a video the seller noticed.
Sellers are not asking for it either. Of sellers who sold from July 2023 to June 2024, 1% named help creating and posting videos of their home as the most important service they wanted from an agent.
Where NAR does break out platforms, the numbers are older. Its 2023 Member Profile — the last edition to publish the table publicly — put Facebook at 67% for professional use, YouTube at 23% and TikTok at 5%. The 2024 and 2025 editions replaced that exhibit with a sentence naming Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram without percentages, so no newer public figure exists.
The same 2023 report contains the clearest statement of how this work gets done. 43% of members said they hire a professional to operate a drone for their business, against 7% who fly one themselves. Six times as many members hire a pilot as fly a drone themselves.
How many listings have a 3D tour or virtual walkthrough?
On Zillow, about one in nine. Zillow states that its proprietary rich media, which includes 3D Home tours and interactive floor plans, was on 11% of new for-sale listings in the second quarter of 2026, and that its paid Showcase product was on about 5% of all new listings in the same quarter. Adoption concentrates: in Zillow's top ten markets, 30% of new for-sale listings carry a 3D Home tour and more than 10% carry Showcase. Showcase itself grew from 1.7% of new listings to 3.7% over the year to the fourth quarter of 2025.
These are the best published listing-level numbers available, and they have two limits worth stating. They count listings on Zillow, not listings nationally, and Showcase is a product Zillow sells, so its share measures purchase as much as practice. Zillow's own filing describes the commercial mechanics precisely: each Showcase credit a customer buys allows the enhanced listing experience for one active for-sale listing at a time.
The capture side has a clearer record, because the company that built most of it was public until recently. Matterport reported 14.1 million spaces under management for fiscal 2024, up from 11.7 million in 2023 and 9.2 million in 2022 — growth of 53% across the two years (our calculation). Spaces under management is a cumulative total that never falls, and it covers every property type, not just homes.
Its subscriber mix is the more interesting disclosure. Of 1,154,000 total subscribers at the end of 2024, 76,000 were paid and 1,078,000 were free — paid subscribers were 6.6% of the base (our calculation). Revenue was $169,699 thousand for 2024 against $136,125 thousand for 2022, both printed in the same statement.
Those are final figures, not current ones. CoStar Group completed its acquisition of Matterport on February 28, 2025 for total consideration of $1,927 million, and Matterport's fiscal 2024 annual report, filed two days before the close, is its last as an independent company. Matterport added $147 million of revenue to CoStar between the close and the end of 2025. Any article describing Matterport as a public company, or quoting a "current" subscriber count, is working from a filing that stopped being updated in February 2025.
How much aerial footage is being flown?
The FAA runs the only registry behind any of this, and it reported 493,396 Remote Pilot certifications issued as of the end of 2025, in the Aerospace Forecast. It forecasts 628,600 remote pilots by 2030. The commercial aircraft registry held roughly 424,000 active Part 107 drones at the end of 2025, about 24 thousand more than a year earlier, and the FAA reports that Over a million aircraft have been registered in that registry since it opened in April 2016 — a cumulative figure, not a fleet count.
New registrations are slowing rather than accelerating. More than 126,000 commercial operators registered new equipment during 2025, down from more than 135,000 in 2024. On the recreational side, over 1.66 million operators had registered cumulatively by the end of December 2025. The FAA also surveys what Part 107 operators actually do: 65.5 percent of those it surveyed reported at least one non-recreational flight in 2025 and 26.7 percent flew only for recreation, so roughly a third flew no non-recreational mission that year.
Set that against the 43% of REALTORS® who hire a drone operator and the 7% who fly themselves, and the shape of the market is clear enough: a licensed supply base of about half a million pilots, roughly a third of whom, on the FAA’s survey, flew no non-recreational mission, selling into an agent population that overwhelmingly buys the flight rather than making it.
How large is the audience a listing is published to?
Zillow Group reported average monthly unique users of 235 million across its apps and sites for 2025, up from 221 million in 2024, and 9,593 million visits against 9,308 million a year earlier, in its annual report on Form 10-K. Its single busiest month was July 2025, at 259 million unique users. The most recent quarter shows the line slipping: 239 million average monthly unique users for the three months ended June 30, 2026, down 2% from 243 million a year earlier.
These are issuer-defined metrics, not audited audience measurements, and each company defines its own. realtor.com is a useful contrast because News Corporation publishes both kinds: 68 million average monthly unique users from its own internal data, and 297 million monthly average visits measured by Comscore, for the quarter ended June 30, 2026. Unique users and visits differ by more than fourfold on the same property in the same quarter, so the two words are not interchangeable.
Zillow's revenue grew from $1,945 million in 2023 through $2,236 million in 2024, with Residential — the segment Showcase sits inside — at $1,704 million in 2025 and Rentals at $630 million. CoStar's residential segment rose from $1,012 million in 2023 to $1,460 million in 2025, and News Corporation's real estate segment from $1,802 million in fiscal 2025 to $2,016 million in fiscal 2026. Compass reported 21,190 principal agents at the end of 2025.
Two companies that appear in older roundups no longer publish anything. Rocket Companies completed its acquisition of Redfin on July 1, 2025 for a total purchase price of $1.7 billion, and Redfin deregistered; its last independent annual report gives 48,129 thousand monthly average visitors for 2024, which is now a historical figure and not a current one. Homes.com is the other gap: CoStar folds it into the residential segment above and publishes no Homes.com-only revenue, visitor count or membership number anywhere in its annual report, so any figure attributed to one is somebody's estimate.
Who shoots and edits real estate video?
Almost nobody on a payroll. The entire U.S. real estate sector employed 560 photographers directly in May 2025, on BLS occupational employment data, against annual average employment of 338,220 in offices of real estate agents and brokers. Even if all 560 worked in those offices, that would be one staff photographer for every 604 of their jobs (our calculation). For film and video editors inside real estate, BLS publishes no estimate at all: its May 2025 series reads “Estimate not released.”
The people doing the work are self-employed, which is exactly why the headline occupation counts look small. BLS establishment data found 51,760 photographers in May 2025; its National Employment Matrix, which counts the self-employed, puts the occupation at 145,000 in the same year, because 66.7 percent of photographers are self-employed. The full count is 2.8 times the payroll count (our calculation). Film and video editors are 35.5 percent self-employed and camera operators 34.7 percent, so the same gap exists for them, smaller.
Occupation
Payroll employment, May 2025
Median annual wage
Projected change, 2025–35
Photographers (27-4021)
51,760
$44,660
-0.7%
Film and video editors (27-4032)
25,610
$75,420
3.7%
Camera operators (27-4031)
21,550
$74,990
—
Real estate sales agents (41-9022)
193,370
$52,830
1.7%
Real estate brokers (41-9021)
46,100
$73,220
0.8%
The pay gap between the two halves of the job is the number most people get wrong. In May 2025 a film or video editor's median wage of $75,420 was well above a photographer's $44,660, and the mean tells the same story: $86,130 for editors against $55,410 for photographers. Projections point in opposite directions too — photographer employment is forecast to fall 1,000 jobs from 2025 to 2035 while editors gain 1,500. The capture end of listing media is shrinking slightly; the assembly end is growing slightly.
The business data agrees. Commercial photography establishments grew from 3,810 in 2019 to 5,065 in 2025, a rise of 33% (our calculation), on BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages figures. Employment in those firms went from 9,309 in 2020 to 11,668 in 2024 and 11,769 in 2025. That series starts a year later than the establishment count, so the two growth rates are not directly comparable, but 11,769 jobs across 5,065 establishments is a market of very small firms. Average annual pay rose from $53,140 in 2019 to $61,789 in 2025, up 16% in nominal terms (our calculation), against 158,689 real estate offices as the customer base.
What the popular real estate video numbers really say
Six numbers carry most of the writing about real estate video. None of them came from where it is said to have come from, and two are attributed to the National Association of REALTORS® on pages NAR itself sourced to a vendor. Each is traced below to the earliest datable document that contains it.
"Listings with video receive 403% more inquiries"
This is usually credited to a 2009 Australian study, sometimes to NAR. It is neither. The earliest datable document we have found with the figure is a 19 March 2012 guest article on PropTechNOW, which says listings with video "receive 403% more enquiries on domain.com.au" and names no study, sample or method. A year later a 12 March 2013 Australian trade-press report quoted Nick Dowling, then chief executive of Jellis Craig — a single Melbourne estate agency — giving the same number for his own firm's annual property review: agents "experienced a 403 per cent increase in enquiries on average when their property marketing featured an online video". Neither discloses a listing count, a control group or a definition of an enquiry. A separate and earlier Australian claim of 400%, from November 2011, was attributed to the portal Domain on the same terms.
The useful part is what Domain’s rival portal publishes now. REA Group reports that listings with a video on realestate.com.au receive 43% more inspection requests than those without, measured over 1 July to 31 December 2025 with land listings excluded. That is a stated period, a stated exclusion and a stated metric — and about a tenth of the number in circulation.
"73% of homeowners are more likely to list with an agent who uses video"
The origin is Properties Online, Inc., a company that sells single-property websites to agents, in its 2012 annual review: 73%. The figure has never changed across the editions we could date. The agent-adoption number printed beside it has changed constantly — 9% in the 2017 edition, 12% in 2021 — which is not how a survey result behaves.
The NAR attribution has a specific and checkable origin. NAR's REALTOR® Magazine did publish the sentence in September 2020 — "73% of homeowners say that they are more likely to list with a real estate agent who uses video, but only 10% of agents use this strategy" — but in that page's markup the figure is a link pointing at the Properties Online PDF, not at NAR research. NAR was citing the vendor. Everyone else has been citing NAR.
The related "only 9% of agents use video" comes from the same vendor document. NAR's own member survey, which discloses its method, found 37% of REALTORS® used video in their marketing in 2021, from 3,104 responses — four times the figure attributed to NAR.
"85% of buyers and sellers want to work with an agent who uses video"
This traces to a single sentence in a June 2014 Inman column: 85% of buyers and sellers prefer an agent who uses video marketing, and only 15% of agents use it. The column credits the 2013 Google and NAR Digital House Hunt study, and its author's own byline identifies them as the communications coordinator for a company then describing itself as the largest provider of walk-through video house tours.
The Google and NAR study does exist and does measure video, but it contains no 85% and nothing about preferring an agent. What it reports, from a 2011 survey, is that 86% of home shoppers who use video do so to find out more about a specific community.
The likelier source of the confusion is an NAR figure about a different subject entirely. In the 2019 edition of Real Estate in a Digital Age, 85% of buyers who used the internet found photos very useful as a website feature. Photos, not video; buyers, not buyers and sellers; usefulness, not agent choice. In the 2024 survey that photos figure reads 83%.
"Homes with aerial photos sell 68% faster"
This one is a photo caption. The earliest datable carrier is an 8 June 2016 guest post on a real-estate trade blog: "According to MLS statistics, the properties photographed by drones sold 68 percent faster." No MLS is named, no sample, no market, no period. The post was illustrated with images supplied by a drone photography company, and two dated reader comments asking for the source were never answered. The frequently named "MLS Technology Inc." does not exist as a source, and VHT Studios, the other common attribution, has never published a 68% figure.
The claim has since mutated and been laundered upward. NAR's own drones page now prints "homes displayed with aerial shots are 68% more likely to sell" — a different claim from selling faster — and names its source as a drone company's March 2023 blog post.
The only study in this family with a disclosed method is not about drones or video at all. VHT Studios analysed Chicago-area homes sold in 2013 and found professionally photographed homes sold 32% faster, 89 days on market against 123. Its own release names the confound: the most experienced and productive agents are typically the biggest users of professional photography, so the comparison is partly measuring who hired the photographer rather than what the photographs did.
"Video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined"
The measurement underneath it counted posts on the ten biggest brand pages on Facebook, and it said something different. As published in August 2012, citing M Booth and Simply Measured: videos are shared 12 times more than links and text posts combined. Links and text posts — not text and images.
A marketing blog converted 12 times into 1,200% later that month, still with the correct base. The wording everyone now quotes, with "text and images" and a credit to Brightcove, first appears in a January 2016 deck by a video company: "Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined." A Brightcove post the following year repeated the sentence and linked back to that deck, which closed the loop and gave the claim a corporate-sounding source it never had. NAR repeats the sentence too, linking it to a third-party marketing blog.
"Listings with virtual tours get 87% more views"
The earliest retrievable form of this is a virtual-tour vendor's statistics page: "Listings on Realtor.com receive 87% more views if they include a virtual tour. (Realtor.com 2007)." That report cannot be located in any form, and the surrounding stat block is otherwise dated 2006 to 2008. The modern versions hyperlink to a realtor.com research page that contains no such figure.
Numbers we could not trace at all
Four claims in this field have no origin document we could find, so this page prints no figure for any of them. There is no locatable MLS study behind the 68% claim — no named MLS, no sample, no period — and no peer-reviewed research on aerial imagery and days on market exists at all. There is no retrievable realtor.com 2007 report behind the 87% claim. There is no original measurement anywhere of video and selling speed: the 32% that circulates for video is VHT's photography study, and the "Zillow internal analysis" cited by one vendor for a video figure is not findable. And the Jellis Craig annual property review that the 403% was quoted from in 2013 is not in any archive; the number itself was already in print, credited to the portal domain.com.au, by March 2012.
We started from the questions people search for about real estate video statistics and looked for the organization that actually produced each answer. Every figure on this page sits in an evidence ledger with its source, the exact table or paragraph it came from, the measurement period, the population measured, and the date we checked it. This edition holds 172 figures from 22 publishers.
On September 20, 2026, every figure then on the page was re-fetched at its source and matched against the recorded wording; figures added since were checked on the date their change-log entry gives. NAR reports are cited on cms.nar.realtor, the host NAR's robots.txt permits for automated requests; the identical files on www.nar.realtor are disallowed and were not fetched there. We left out the 2025 edition of NAR's Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, which NAR sells and publishes free only as front matter, so the current-year buyer figures here come from NAR's freely published Generational Trends report and press releases instead. We also left out Matterport's square-footage table, which its own filing labels in millions at a figure a thousand times too small, and every claim in the final section for which no origin document could be found.
We only cite the producer: government agencies, regulators, company filings and official posts, and the survey owner's own report. We do not cite statistics roundups, Statista-style aggregators, or salary sites without a public method. We did not bypass paywalls or sign-up forms; where a full report was gated, we used only the figures its publisher states publicly.
Figures marked "our calculation" are arithmetic on the cited numbers, and anyone can reproduce them:
This edition contains no Mark Studios customer data.
Limitations
One organization produces most of the demand-side evidence. NAR surveys both the buyers and the agents, and it is a trade association for the agents. Where NAR is the only source for a figure, this page says so.
Agent-reported and seller-reported figures are different measurements. NAR's technology survey asks members what they use; its buyer and seller survey asks sellers what their agent did. The two are fielded in different years on different populations and cannot be subtracted cleanly.
NAR bundles drone stills with drone video in a single category, so no published figure separates aerial photography from aerial footage.
Platform adoption figures measure one platform. Zillow's 3D tour and Showcase shares are calculated on Zillow's own new listings, and Showcase is a product Zillow sells, so the share measures purchase as much as practice.
Company operating metrics are issuer-defined. Unique users, visits, subscribers and spaces under management are each defined by the company reporting them and are not audited audience measurements.
Matterport's figures stop in February 2025, when CoStar Group completed its acquisition and Matterport ceased filing. They are final, not current.
BLS establishment surveys exclude the self-employed, who are two thirds of photographers, so payroll counts understate the people doing this work.
Most figures describe the United States, with Australian figures from REA Group and Australian trade press labeled as such.
How to cite this page
For a single figure, cite the original publisher named next to it, and link here if the verification trail is useful to your readers. Each figure has its own anchor, so you can link straight to it, for example https://www.markstudios.com/research/real-estate-video-statistics#AGT-018. To cite the page as a whole:
Mark Studios. "Real Estate Video Statistics." Last verified Oct 1, 2026. https://www.markstudios.com/research/real-estate-video-statistics
APA
Mark Studios. (2026, October 1). Real estate video statistics. https://www.markstudios.com/research/real-estate-video-statistics
MLA
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Chicago
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BibTeX
@misc{markstudios_real_estate_video_statistics_2026,
author = {{Mark Studios}},
title = {{Real Estate Video Statistics}},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
url = {https://www.markstudios.com/research/real-estate-video-statistics},
note = {Last verified 2026-10-01}
}
Our calculations and the evidence table are free to reuse with attribution and a link to this page. Each underlying figure remains the claim of its original publisher, and some publishers ask for a link when their figures are reused.
Adweek (published as SocialTimes), reporting data from M Booth and Simply Measured, M Booth, Simply Measured Infographic (2012-08-20). Accessed 2026-09-20.
We re-verify every figure quarterly and when a major source publishes a new edition. The next scheduled review is December 2026. Corrections go to contact@markstudios.com.
Sep 20, 2026: First published with 167 figures from 22 publishers, each checked against its original source.
Sep 24, 2026: NAR replaced its REALTOR® Technology Survey page with a new report, so the one figure from it (AGT-011) now links to an archived copy of the page as it stood on Sep 16, 2026, where it was re-checked.
Oct 1, 2026: Re-checked all 159 sourced figures against their sources in our scheduled re-verification; none had changed.
Oct 28, 2026: Added NAR’s 2026 REALTORS® Technology Report (released Sept 22, 2026): drone photography/video 48% (52% in 2025), MLS 96%, e-signature 79%, AI-generated content 41%, and 36% spending $50 to $250 a month; the drone vs seller-video gap is now 36 points. NAR’s public summary lists only the top seven tools (the full report is sold), so the technology chart stays on the 2025 survey. The 2026 Generational Trends report is also sold, and its free release carries none of this page’s measures, so the marketing and home-search figures stay on the 2025 edition.
Oct 28, 2026: New-home sales moved to the September 2026 Census/HUD release (676,000 a year, seasonally adjusted; July was 607,000). The four new-home rows now cite the dated release file, so they no longer drift when Census posts a new month.
Oct 30, 2026: Corrected four descriptions. The 4,746,000 homes NAR reports for 2024 are primary-residence purchases, 84% of all home purchases, not every sale; listing videos rank 10th of the 14 website features NAR asks buyers to rate, not last; the 43% comes from realestate.com.au, the rival of Domain, which is the portal the 403% claim was credited to; and for film and video editors in real estate BLS publishes no estimate, rather than counting none.
Oct 31, 2026: Added dates some sentences were missing: Zillow’s 74% and 70% are from its 2023 survey, the 1% of sellers covers sales from July 2023 to June 2024, the editor and photographer wages are May 2025 figures and their projections run from 2025 to 2035, the Google and NAR video figure comes from a 2011 survey, and the 85% photos figure from the 2019 edition of NAR’s Real Estate in a Digital Age.
Frequently asked questions
What percentage of real estate agents use video?
No organization publishes that number. NAR's technology surveys have no standalone video line: the closest category is drone photography/video, which bundles stills with motion, at 48% in NAR's 2026 REALTORS® Technology Report (52% in 2025). Virtual tours, the other close category, were at 38% in the 2025 survey. The only video percentage NAR prints comes from sellers, 12% of whom say their agent used video to market the home. Any single figure quoted for agent video adoption is either one of these categories or a vendor estimate.
Do homes with video sell faster?
No original measurement of video and selling speed exists that we could find. The closest published figure with a stated method is REA Group's: listings with a video on realestate.com.au receive 43% more inspection requests, measured over the second half of 2025 with land excluded. That is inquiry volume, not speed. The 32% often quoted for video is VHT Studios' study of professional photography in Chicago in 2013, and VHT's own release notes that the busiest agents are also the biggest users of professional photography.
Is the '403% more inquiries' real estate video statistic real?
Not as it is usually cited. It is not a 2009 study and not an NAR figure. The earliest datable document we have found is a March 2012 Australian article that credits it to the portal domain.com.au with no study or method behind it; a March 2013 trade-press report then quoted the chief executive of one Melbourne agency giving the same 403% for his own firm's listings, with no listing count, control group or definition of an inquiry. A rival portal, REA Group's realestate.com.au, now publishes a measured 43%.
Did NAR say 73% of homeowners prefer an agent who uses video?
NAR printed the sentence but did not produce the number. The 73% originates with Properties Online, a company selling single-property websites to agents, in its 2012 annual review. NAR's REALTOR® Magazine repeated it in September 2020 and hyperlinked the figure to that vendor's PDF rather than to NAR research. NAR's own member survey, with its method disclosed, found 37% of REALTORS® used video in marketing in 2021.
How many home buyers use video when house hunting?
37% of buyers used an online video site as an information source in their 2024 search, on NAR's Generational Trends report. As a listing feature, video rates lower: 29% of internet-using buyers called videos very useful, against 83% for photos. In the one study that asked why, Google and NAR's 2013 Digital House Hunt, 86% of home shoppers who used video did so to learn about a specific community.
How many listings have a virtual tour?
About one in nine on Zillow. Zillow reports its proprietary rich media, which includes 3D Home tours and interactive floor plans, on 11% of new for-sale listings in the second quarter of 2026, and its paid Showcase product on about 5%. From the seller's side, 16% of sellers say their agent used virtual tours. Nobody publishes a national count across all MLSs.
How many drone pilots are there for real estate work?
The FAA had issued 493,396 Remote Pilot certifications by the end of 2025 and held about 424,000 active Part 107 registered aircraft, across every commercial use, not just real estate. On the buying side, 43% of REALTORS® said they hire a professional to operate a drone, and 7% fly one themselves, in NAR's 2023 Member Profile.
How often is this page updated?
Every figure is re-checked against its original source each quarter, and sooner when a major source publishes a new edition, such as NAR's Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers each November, its Technology Survey in the autumn, or the FAA Aerospace Forecast each spring. The Last verified date changes only after that check, and each change is recorded in the change log.