Virtual staging offers all of the advantages of traditional home staging by a staging company, but with a technological spin. This method can save homeowners and brokers a lot of time, money, and headaches while still delivering excellent results.
Virtual Staging to Help Sell a Home
Virtual staging, which has steadily gained steam over the past decade, has really taken off since 2020. Fears about the pandemic and its associated stay-at-home mentality has made in-person property visits a rarer occurrence. People have substituted online home tours for in-person tours at a record rate. This has made real estate photography an even more important aspect of the home sales process than ever before.
What is Virtual Staging?
The term “virtual staging” refers to the process of digitally staging images of a home rather than the actual residence. It’s possible that the house is vacant, or that it’s crammed with mismatched furniture, trinkets, and junk. After the images are shot, the virtual stager enhances the home’s appearance with special photo-editing software.
This software can eliminate undesired clutter from property photos and replace it with 3d furniture, décor, and accessories. Every room of the house is meticulously prepared to make it appear as if it has been physically staged. The finished images are then uploaded to the listing, allowing sellers the opportunity to convince prospective buyers to buy or book a showing.
The Importance of Virtual Staging
Elsewhere on this site, we have discussed the importance of home staging. In sum, it helps sell property faster and for top dollar. But the reality is that the physical staging process costs money and results in significant turnaround time. Despite these shortcomings, there is no substitute for a perfectly staged home when buyers walk through the front door and see spaces they would really want to live in.
As times have changed and the number of in-person showings has declined since the pandemic, the importance of online photos has exploded. If a home has attractive photos in web listings, it has a better chance of getting a potential buyer to book one of the limited appointments they are willing to make. The goal of online photos is to get someone interested enough to come and see the home for themselves.
That’s where virtual staging comes in. A home may not be physically staged to its best advantage, or it may not be staged at all. Virtual staging adds the right furnishings in the right spots to show off the best attributes of a room and presents the finished room as a virtually staged room. This can actually be done in minutes, not days.
The staging solution effect online is the same as taking professional photos of a perfectly staged room and using that photo online for a real estate listing. One actually exists, the other is a photo rendering. Both will accomplish the goal of getting a prospective buyer interested in seeing the space in person.
People aren’t buying your things or furnishings, they are buying space. Show them enough space to do what they want to do in each room and do it attractively, and you’ve got a recipe for earning a showing.
How is the Virtual Staging Solution Accomplished?
Virtual staging requires specialized software that enables the user, or visual stager, to manipulate digital images of actual room photos. This staging tool is used by a virtual staging company.
The homeowner or listing agent has photos for virtual staging taken by a professional photographer or the virtual staging company’s photographer.
The first step is to start with one photo of a room that will be featured on the property website. The software allows the digital designer to delete existing furnishings and things from the photo image. As an example, in a living room, the software enables furniture removal: sofas, tables, pictures, books, knick-knacks and area rugs.
After item removal, what is left is the flooring, blank walls, a blank ceiling and any built in features such as fireplaces or bookshelves that are permanently attached to the home. Now you have 3d floor plans which can then be ‘furnished’ with virtual furniture.
The digital designer then selects furniture from a library of items stored in the software program. Each item is placed on the image of the empty room as if they existed in those spots in reality. The art is to select appropriate furnishings that are of the right scale to produce an attractive layout and showcase the room’s function and spaciousness.
A really good virtual designer can make the room look almost real with the most popular design styles that appeal to the home’s target market. That is the goal.
Those manipulated or “staged room” photos are then watermarked or otherwise labeled as ‘virtually staged’. This is an important aspect of the process. It is a bit misleading to a potential buyer to see a beautifully furnished room and then when they actually arrive at the home, the room is either empty or not so beautiful. Virtual staging shows ‘what could be’, not what actually is. So the labeling of the image is important so as not to mislead a buyer.
Pluses and Minus to Virtual Staging
Pluses
- Virtual staging saves the seller time and money because they won’t have to move furniture and décor or pay for separate storage while their home is on the market.
- A virtual staging service is usually far less expensive than traditional staging services in terms of cost. It can be accomplished in less time and at a fraction of the cost. The turnaround time to get a home on the market is shortened.
- Virtual staging is a great technique to entice buyers and offer them a clear idea of what your home may look like if they opted to live there if you plan to promote your home online.
- Virtual staging software provides a large number of color, furniture, plant, and other options, allowing the stager to make choices that are matched to your specific market and the latest interior design style trends.
- You may benefit from staging as a seller without having to leave your home, change things around, or be extra cautious with furnishings that aren’t yours. Your existing furniture, no matter what condition, becomes less of a factor in virtually staged properties.
- Because most professional home stagers have prior experience with house and interior design, your images will be polished and gorgeous and tuned to your potential buyers when it’s time to submit them to the internet.
- A virtual home staging project may usually be completed in a few business days from start to finish. As a result, sellers won’t have to wait for an appointment or deal with the hassles of traditional staging.
- Virtually staging homes solves the problem of vacant properties that may sit on the market for longer than furnished properties. It will help a buyer imagine living in the home, even if there is no sign of life in the home currently.
Minuses
- If the virtual staging isn’t done properly, the images may appear “artificial” or the furniture and accessories may appear to be digital images rather than real furniture.
- Although virtual staging is permitted in some cities, it is not permitted by the real estate bodies in all cities. If you’re working in a market where it’s prohibited, you’ll have to resort to traditional staging.
- It’s crucial to note that virtual staging only affects the things in the home; it has no effect on paint colors or crown molding finishes. If those objects are changed, it may mislead purchasers and cause problems for the seller when the house is being shown. Image enhancement, such as digitally repairing home defects, are frowned upon and should be labeled as ‘suggested improvements’ or similar verbiage.