Subtitles: The Setting That Doubles Watch Time
Most property video is watched on mute. What the subtitles should say, how large, and where they must never sit.
Assume the sound is off. A large share of feed video is watched muted, and property is browsed in exactly the places where sound is awkward — offices, trains, waiting rooms, bed. A video that only works with audio is a video most of your audience never really saw.
Why mute is the default
People browse property in stolen moments, and stolen moments are usually silent ones. The viewer who would have called you is often the one who could not turn the sound on.
Muted viewing is also how platforms autoplay. Your first three seconds arrive silent by default on most feeds, so anything essential said aloud in those three seconds was not heard.
Subtitles help even when there is no speech. Naming the room, the area and the floor as on-screen text keeps a mute viewer oriented and stops them scrolling out of confusion.
Subtitles are not a transcript. Cut the filler, keep the numbers, and never let a line run more than about six words.
Writing subtitles that read
One line at a time. Two-line subtitles force the viewer to read rather than watch, which is the opposite of what the video is for.
Numbers must be digits, not words. "1,450 sq ft" reads instantly; "fourteen hundred and fifty square feet" does not, and it eats two lines doing it.
Auto-generated captions need one pass by hand. They will get the room names right and almost every number wrong, and the numbers are the entire point.
Set the text at roughly 5% of frame height. Smaller is unreadable on a phone held at arm's length; larger starts covering the flat you are selling.
Placement and styling
White type on a soft dark shadow. Coloured boxes and heavy outlines read as amateur, and both become harder to read against a bright balcony shot.
The bottom third is wrong on Instagram — the caption, the handle and the interface all live there. Sit subtitles at about 60% of frame height, above the interface and below the visual centre.
Burn them in rather than relying on platform captions. Platform captions render inconsistently across apps, get switched off by the viewer, and vanish entirely when somebody downloads and reposts your video.
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Try PropVid free See all 1,094 templatesFrequently asked questions
Should I burn subtitles in or use the platform's auto-captions?
Burn them in. Platform captions are inconsistent between apps, can be switched off, and disappear when the video is downloaded and reshared.
Do subtitles help if the video has no speech?
Yes, as labels. Naming the room, area and floor as on-screen text does the same orienting job for a muted viewer.
Does adding subtitles help SEO?
Not directly on Instagram. On YouTube, an uploaded caption file is machine-readable and does help the platform understand and surface the video.
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