What is Virtual Home Staging?
To sell a home on the real estate market, the first impression matters. And in this digital era, you need to post good home pictures online. An overwhelming majority of potential buyers start their search online, and this trend only accelerated during the pandemic. Therefore, professionally-staged photos of your home are vital to generate enough homebuyer attention to get your house sold quickly and for top dollar.
Image Source: Explodingtopics.com
How to Stage a Home for Sale
There are a few ways to stage a home for sale: on your own, with an in-person home stager, or with virtual staging solutions. Note that for each option, hiring a professional photographer can greatly enhance results.
1. On Your Own
Homeowners can DIY the job by decluttering and organizing their entire home and arranging existing furniture neatly for real estate photos. This can produce nice results, but real estate agents often recommend that you get your home staged professionally, whether it’s done traditionally or virtually.
2. Traditional Home Staging
For uber professional results, you can hire a traditional home staging service. This option will help you optimize your home’s layout and even swap out current furniture for rentals for a temporary period. An in-person interior designer will ensure that your home looks beautiful for professional photography. Physical staging produces the most realistic results and often recommended for luxury real estate listings. This option also costs the most.
3. Get Virtual Staged Photos
Alternatively, you can hire a virtual staging service which can add full sets of realistic looking furniture and decor to an empty room through a photo editing program. Realtors can recommend this option when they need to stage a vacant house, especially if it’s a rental property. If a homeowner’s property doesn’t have the right furniture to make good photos, then a virtual stager can enhance current setups or empty rooms and then edit them with virtual home decor.
The Benefits of Virtual Staging
There are many benefits of virtual staging that compels property owners to use this service for their listing photos.
- Cost Savings: Investors can get fully furnished photos of empty homes, saving thousands on in-person decorating costs and furniture rental.
- Many Design Options: You can choose between different design styles with a few swipes and clicks in the design software.
- Easy Enhancements: Virtually staged photos can enhance random empty spaces in a home, like a room formerly used as a “catch all” in the home, or to enhance rooms with less-than-stellar furniture.
- Photorealistic Elements: Today’s home staging software delivers results that make it harder than ever to tell that the furniture in the room is actually a virtual image. With gradients, shadows, and other stylistic details in place, you will have to look hard to notice!
- Less Work and Time Involved: Not needing to bring in physical furniture doesn’t just reduce virtual staging costs, but it greatly shortens the turnaround time to produce beautiful home photos: from the living room to landscaping!
Virtual Staging in Real Estate Marketing
In real estate, virtual staging is an invaluable tool that takes real estate marketing to the next level. For example, the Marketing Team at Marketplace Homes can take photos of an empty (or underfurnished) house and digitally enhance them with beauitful furntiure and decorational accents. Nicole L., our Marketing Concierge Director, oversees the marketing and promotion of all our home listings. Virtual staging has made the marketing process faster, smoother, and expanded her team’s capabilities.
“Virtual staging is a great tool that helps people envision what rooms can be. While vacant photos are still important and great for seeing the details within a room, virtually staged photos are great for sparking an emotional response from prospective buyers!” -Nicole L., Marketing Concierge Director
Virtual Staging vs. Real Staging
Both virtual staging and real staging are useful, valid home staging methods that are appropriate in different situations. Typically, vacant homes that aren’t in the luxury market benefit the most from virtual staging, while high-end listings benefit from real-life staging coupled with professional photography.
No matter what choice you make, having staged photos can help homes sell faster and for a higher sales price.
Examples of Virtually Staged Images
Before and after photos aren’t just entertaining when you’re watching a makeover story or my favorite- extreme home makeovers for houses. But digital staging with virtual staging software can also transform an empty, blank space into a cozy home where you can imagine passing a peaceful evening with your friends, loved ones, and pets.
Alicia Persson is a Content Strategist SEO writer at Marketplace Homes, utilizing previous years of experience on real estate teams that specialized in investments and property management. Before she joined Marketplace Homes, she was also a freelance writer for 7 years, leading to a specialization in real estate and home living content for boutique digital marketing agencies. During her writing years, she learned the basics of SEO and gained experience writing for many different clients, making her versatile at creating diverse content.
She is a proud University of Virginia master’s graduate and enjoyed her undergraduate years at the University of Mary Washington. When Alicia is not writing, she plays keytar and sings in a local 90’s rock cover band, or she spends time with her amazing family.