Table of Contents
- Why Staging a Home?
- What Is Virtual Staging?
- Real Estate Virtual Staging Pros
- Virtual Staging Cons
- Is Virtual Staging Worth It?
- PhotoUp’s Virtual Staging for Stunning Real Estate Photos
Are you debating whether real estate virtual staging is for you and want to learn more about the pros and cons of this digital version of home staging?
Then, this article is for you!
Virtual staging is taking the real estate industry by storm. With COVID still active and social distancing recommended, more and more agents are increasing the amount of digital marketing for their listings, making virtual staging a hot tool.
In this post, we’ll share some pros and cons of virtual staging for real estate and discuss whether virtual staging is worth it.
Let’s start by looking at why you should stage a home before selling it in the first place.
Why Staging a Home?
Staging a home is one of the best real estate marketing tools that you’ll have at your disposal when you’re selling a property.
Buyers often struggle to imagine themselves living in an empty shell of a room or home. But if you can show potential buyers a warm, and inviting space that feels lived-in, then your chances of making a sale can improve drastically.
The important thing to remember is to remove personal items and declutter the space to not put off potential buyers who don’t share your personal style.
For this reason, virtual staging is an excellent tool to depersonalize spaces and make a home look like it’s taken straight from an interior magazine.
What Is Virtual Staging?
Virtual staging is a powerful real estate marketing and visualization tool, where professional CAD designers add digital furniture and decor to empty or outdated spaces.
You can use virtual staging to add modern, fresh furniture and decor to empty rooms, declutter and depersonalize spaces, and perform virtual renovations, landscaping, or redecorations.
How does the virtual staging process work?
Virtual staging designers create interiors in specific styles by adding or removing furniture, editing colors, wall paint, accessories, lighting, and other elements in a given space to make it look like an inviting home.
It works much like traditional home staging but without having to physically add furniture and decor to the home.
Instead, you virtually stage the space using digital furniture which only costs a fraction of regular home staging. Typically, virtual staging costs 97% less than traditional home staging.
Fast & Affordable
Virtual Staging Service
Interiors. Landscapes. Commercial. Virtually transform any space.
Real Estate Virtual Staging Pros
There are many advantages to using a virtual staging provider to create captivating real estate photos, and we have listed 6 main pros.
1. Powerful Visualization Tool
By marketing with beautiful hi-res photographs of furnished rooms Realtors, agents, and sellers can highlight the potential of a space and tap into a buyer’s imagination and their hopes and dreams for their new home.
Buyers can imagine themselves living in the home and even see how it could look fully renovated and decorated.
2. Virtual Staging Is Flexible
Virtual staging is extremely flexible. For example, you can quickly and easily transform a nursery into a spare bedroom, a closet into an office, or a cramped living room into a beautiful open space.
Virtual staging allows for creativity. It also ensures that you position your property as attractive as possible for new buyers, which can help you sell it faster and for above market rate.
3. Can Help You Sell a Listing Faster and for More Money
Photorealistic images of tastefully furnished rooms with great lighting, plants, family photographs, and decor bring a vacant property to life and make it much easier to sell.
For example, a survey done by HomeStagingResources.com found that 85% of staged homes sold for between 6-25% more than unstaged homes in the same market.
That’s a significant advantage to have, and in this age of social distancing and digital marketing, virtual staging makes sense from both a cost and an effectiveness standpoint.
No matter the property, you can find an interior design style that caters to your specific market and can help accelerate the sale.
4. Virtual Staging Is Affordable
Virtual staging is very affordable and can help you save on home staging costs up to 97%. For instance, virtual staging with PhotoUp starts at only $20 to $30 per room or image.
Home staging is exponentially more expensive, typically between $500-1000 per home. So, there are certainly cost benefits as well as aesthetic benefits to using virtual staging.
Spending a few hundred dollars on a set of images that will last forever versus spending thousands of dollars doing traditional home staging makes the decision seem like an easy one.
5. Virtual Staging Is Much Faster
A room can be shot and virtually staged in a matter of hours, as opposed to days with traditional home staging. Plus, you can also virtually stage many properties at once.
PhotoUp has a turnaround time of 48 hours or less. You’ll receive low resolution proofs already after 24 hours, and then your virtually staged images are delivered shortly after your approval.
6. Expanded Market Reach
Another benefit of using a virtual staging is that you’ll dramatically expand your real estate marketing reach. Buyers from all over the world will be able to access your images online.
This broadens your marketing reach and allows potential buyers to make a decision or ask follow-up questions to the real estate agent at any time.
When you opt for physical home staging, your target market is restricted. Only buyers who live locally and have the time and means to travel to the property for a showing will be able to reap the benefits of your home staging service.
Not to mention, real estate agents typically only show a home 1-2 times per month.
Real Estate Virtual Staging Cons
As with any real estate marketing service, there might be a few cons to using virtual staging.
1. Misrepresentation Issues
If you fail to disclose that your images are virtually staged, buyers can feel misled when the home doesn’t look like on the images when they come to the actual showing.
However, this can easily be avoided by marking your real estate images as “virtually staged” or adding before and after photos of the room.
This is also the best practice to make sure you stay compliant with the MLS. For more details, you can check out our blog post on Is Virtual Staging Legal?
2. Must Be Done by a Professional
Virtual staging must be performed by a professional to provide homebuyers with the quality they expect and demand.
Virtual staging performed by a novice can look fake or unrealistic, which only makes the space feel off-putting and discourages buyers from physically touring the home.
With this in mind, always invest in a professional virtual staging service.
Is Virtual Staging Worth It?
Yes! There’s simply no question that virtual staging is worth it for Realtors, agents, and sellers.
First of all, it’s a fraction of the cost of physical home staging. And you can have a marketing image ready and uploaded onto the MLS within 24 hours.
Compare that to physical staging that normally takes between a week and two weeks to set up, photograph, and get the listing online.
With so much marketing taking place digitally these days, it’s easier than ever to market your listings online.
And most prospective buyers prefer to view photos online first as opposed to a physical visit. They first want to see if it’s worth it visiting the property for a closer look.
Fast & Affordable
Virtual Staging Service
Interiors. Landscapes. Commercial. Virtually transform any space.
PhotoUp’s Virtual Staging for Stunning Real Estate Photos
Virtually staging empty spaces help prospective homebuyers visualize the space better and imagine themselves living in the home.
As you can see from the example above, it helps showcasing the home’s full potential.
The extensive online virtual staging library and the team of skilled designers employed by PhotoUp allows you to have rooms customized exactly as you want them with minimal cost and effort.
PhotoUp makes virtual staging quick, effortless and affordable. Our full range of virtual staging services include:
- Virtually staging for vacant or furnished rooms
- Redesigns and full makeovers
- Color changes for walls, furnishings, and flooring
- Digital decluttering, repairs, and updates
- Virtual landscaping
- And more.
Not only that, PhotoUp is a non-stop-shop for real estate marketing professionals and also offer services such as:
- Real estate photo editing
- Single property websites
- Video editing
- Floor plans
- Property flyers
- Virtual assistants
- And much more!
PhotoUp Virtual Staging Demo
To see how easy it is to get started with PhotoUp, you can check out our virtual staging demo:
It’s as simple as 1-2-3!
So why wait?!
Sign up for a free PhotoUp account today, and let our expert designers make your listing photos look captivating, modern, and fresh.
Additionally, the virtually staged images are high-resolution, optimized for the web and ready for use on your MLS and favorite real estate marketing platforms.
We hope this blog posts helped you realize the pros and cons of real estate virtual staging. If you enjoyed reading this post, you may also want to check out the following resources:
