Video Wins With Gen Z. The Trend Does Not.
The renter who moved this year is about thirty, searches on a phone, and keeps scrolling past the model unit. What the 2025 surveys actually say about video, why the honest walkthrough of the real unit beats the trending audio, and why we film the house and not the dance.
StudioWho is renting now
Zillow's 2025 Consumer Housing Trends Report, built from surveys of more than twenty-four thousand renters, puts the median age of a renter who moved in the past year at thirty-three. Gen Z, counted there as ages eighteen to thirty, made up forty-four percent of those recent renters. Eighty-one percent of recent renters searched on a mobile website and seventy-three percent in an app, and the typical one used five sites or apps before signing.
Behind them is the next cohort. In Pew Research Center's autumn 2025 survey of American teenagers, sixty-one percent said they are on TikTok every day and fifty-five percent on Instagram, and about one in five described their TikTok use as almost constant. Those are the renters of the next five years. They will arrive at a leasing office having watched a thousand apartments on a phone.
StudioWhat they want to see
Apartments.com's 2025 research on Gen Z renters is blunt about what that audience wants from a listing. Six in ten Gen Z renters keep scrolling if a listing has no photos of the specific unit, and they are more likely than other renters to expect videos and 3D tours to show the exact unit advertised, not a model. One renter in the survey said it plainly: using images of a generic room is misleading.
Zillow's numbers add a caution. Only a quarter of recent renters called a recorded video tour essential to their decision, behind pictures and a floor plan. Read the two together and the picture is clear. Video is not a box to tick. The audience does not want a video of an apartment. It wants the truth about this apartment, and video happens to be the fastest way to tell it.
Why the trend loses
The feed is full of agents doing the same thing: the trending audio, the pointing at captions, the dance in the empty kitchen. It can earn views, and the views come from everywhere and no one. Nothing in that format answers the question the renter is asking, which is whether this unit, on this floor, with this view, is the one. The trend is made for the algorithm. The renter is looking for a home.
What wins with that audience is the plain, well-made walkthrough of the real place, shot steadily, lit honestly, with the agent saying what is good and what is not. The view, the noise from the road, the closet that is smaller than the floor plan suggests. That video gets saved, sent to a roommate and watched again at midnight, and the agent in it becomes the person who told the truth. That is the only recognition in this business that lasts.
StudioHow we film it
So we film the house and not the dance. One steady pass through the actual unit or the actual listing, the street outside, the walk to the parking and the mailbox, and the agent on camera for thirty seconds answering what a renter would ask. The same face, the same honesty, every week, in the same neighborhoods, until the audience that has watched twenty of them knows exactly who to message.
The National Association of Realtors' 2025 technology survey found that thirty-nine percent of its members named social media as the source of their highest-quality leads, ahead of their CRM and the MLS. That is the prize. It is not won by following the trend. It is won by being the one account in the feed that shows the real unit, and by doing it long enough that a neighborhood decides you are the name. A Brand Is Not a Launch and The One Number, earlier in this Journal, say how we measure whether it is working.
Sources
- Zillow Group Population Science, Renters: Results from the Zillow Consumer Housing Trends Report 2025 (October 27, 2025) https://www.zillow.com/research/renters-housing-trends-report-2025/
- Pew Research Center, Teens, Social Media and AI Chatbots 2025 (December 2025; survey of 1,458 U.S. teens, September 25 to October 9, 2025) https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/teens-and-social-media-fact-sheet/
- Apartments.com, Gen Z: Your Guide to the Newest Renter Generation (October 6, 2025) https://www.apartments.com/grow/learning-center/gen-z-renters
- National Association of Realtors, 2025 Realtor Technology Survey (fielded July 2025; 1,241 responses) https://www.nar.realtor/reports/realtor-technology-survey
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