Real estate companies have started filming short dramas to sell houses. Recently, CITIC Taifu Real Estate Investment filmed an AI live action short drama. The short drama revolves around property services and urban cultural narratives, incorporating information about two high-end residential projects planned by the company in Shanghai.

CITIC Taifu Real Estate is not the first real estate company to produce short dramas. As early as June 2025, Nantong Weifu Group used the real estate project as the filming location for the short drama "Real Estate is also Moving", and the traffic exceeded 10 million within 48 hours of its launch. Binzhou Shuangtai Real Estate and China Merchants Shekou Changsha Company also have works. From the publicly available playback and discussion data, it can be seen that most of the advertisements tend to be extended versions, with limited breaking through.

What really brought the short drama of real estate companies into the spotlight was Hangzhou Xingyao Real Estate Group's 18 episode short drama "Please Don't Love Me, the Program Will Make Mistakes" in June 2026 for less than 200000 yuan. Public data from the Hongguo platform shows that the popularity of the drama once exceeded 15 million. The head of the Planning Department of Xingyao Real Estate Group said that some clients came to view the property because of this short drama.

The cost of a short drama

The success of 'Please Don't Love Me' in generating traffic at low cost lies in the real estate companies' reuse of their own scene resources, while eliminating sunk costs unrelated to content quality in traditional promotional videos. The filming for the series is entirely based on existing model rooms, clubs, and heated swimming pools from projects related to Xingyao Real Estate Group. The actors are mainly internal employees and guest appearances from homeowners, without high lead actor salaries. The team is also formed by temporary transfers, and the filming cycle is short.

Compared to traditional real estate promotional videos, under the same communication demands, a promotional video with acceptable quality is generally priced in the range of tens of thousands to millions of yuan, and additional budget is needed for advertising traffic. The average production cycle of high-quality short dramas is less than two weeks, and they can be produced with a budget of hundreds of thousands of yuan. Under the same budget, the breadth of content reach is often better than that of traditional promotional videos.

The plate of the short play is still expanding. According to data from the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, 430000 short dramas will be launched nationwide in the first eight months of 2026, which is 13 times that of the entire year last year. According to the data of QuestMobile, a domestic Internet big data company, the number of active users of Hongguo Short Drama exceeded 200 million in September, and the number of people aged 25 to 34 accounted for 46% of the consumption group of micro short drama according to the statistics of Ai Media. For suburban projects targeting the post-90s and post-00s generation, a high degree of overlap between the audience of the short drama and the homebuyer group is a key prerequisite for success.

A supplementary tool for brand rejuvenation

The fundamental driving force behind the collective trial of short dramas by real estate companies comes from the dual pressure of huge land investment and difficult project elimination. Real estate companies with different positioning have adopted differentiated short drama marketing strategies to cope with market diversion.

Xingyao Real Estate has heavily invested in suburban areas such as Xiasha in Hangzhou, and has accurately targeted young and needy groups through short dramas, using high-frequency content to reach and compensate for the declining efficiency of offline customer acquisition channels. In contrast, CITIC Taifu Real Estate has invested in AI live action micro dramas in core areas of Shanghai, focusing on property services and urban cultural narratives, aiming to serve high net worth customers and improve their customer base. This type of customer group has a long decision-making cycle and values brand trust and lifestyle identity. Short dramas are not direct promotions, but rather a means of brand maintenance. As of October 2026, the conversion rate of the Bund Road project has reached 80%, but new high-end markets are entering the market, increasing the pressure of customer segmentation. In this context, CITIC Taifu chooses to maintain brand popularity and strengthen emotional connections through serialized short dramas, which do not undertake direct promotional functions.

Both paths place the short drama in the position of "front-end touchdown" rather than being treated as a trading tool itself. Short dramas can use real-life model rooms as a carrier to present scenes that are close to future life, which is more immersive than static model rooms, effectively achieving brand exposure and customer traffic attraction. However, the chain from online traffic to actual transactions is still long, and buying a house as a low-frequency, high customer price decision requires buyers to cross multiple thresholds such as layout, price, and supporting facilities. Therefore, short dramas are seen more as supplementary tools for brand rejuvenation rather than core channels for driving sales.

In addition to directly shooting short dramas, some real estate companies also revitalize their existing assets by building an industrial ecosystem.

Greenland Group has established a 604 acre "Drama Gravity" short drama base in Zhengzhou, while Bodi Holdings is building a Ningbo short drama industry base. By transforming idle commercial and office buildings into filming venues, the plan aims to carry over a thousand short dramas and reshape the value of existing properties. Starting from 2025, real estate companies will open up idle commercial complexes and villa model rooms in multiple locations to connect with production teams, using a "landlord+implant" approach to obtain site rent and zero cost brand exposure. These attempts are essentially space leasing and brand replacement made by real estate companies in the context of digital marketing.

The fundamental driving force behind the collective filming of short dramas by real estate companies is not the attraction of the film and television industry, but the declining cost-effectiveness of traditional customer acquisition channels. Channel commissions have risen significantly, with some projects having commissions exceeding 10%. As a result, the proportion of naturally visiting customers continues to shrink. Short dramas, with a production cycle of less than two weeks and a cost of hundreds of thousands of yuan, provide a low-cost and affordable opportunity for trial and error. The investment in filming short dramas can be almost negligible in the annual marketing expenses of real estate companies, but the exposure and visit leads it brings may require several times the budget to reach under traditional paths. Short dramas may not become the mainstream channel for real estate marketing, but they may become a normalized "front-end probe" under the pressure of decentralization, testing a customer base that traditional marketing has already found difficult to reach efficiently at a very low cost. After the window is opened, whether it can retain people still brings back the oldest questions of product, price, and delivery.

(The author of this article is a researcher at the Jingguan Research Institute)