Your Guide to Virtual Home Staging
Every real estate professional knows that vacant homes usually sit on the market longer because most clients can’t picture themselves in a property with bare walls and empty floors. Virtual Staging allows your clients to see the full potential.
In today’s marketplace, it’s more important than ever to present your online listings in their best possible light. According to the National Association of Realtors, 90% of buyers use the Internet to search for a home, and 97% find the photographs to be the most useful features on brokers’ sites. With Virtual Staging, you can quickly and inexpensively stage an empty property online to help attract more potential buyers without the time and trouble of traditional staging.
Traditional Home Staging?
In general terms, home staging means getting your home ready for market and making it look its absolute best…. Both the interior and exterior. Home staging includes doing all the nitty-gritty stuff like cleaning the home, so it’s Q-tip clean, decluttering, doing any needed repairs, landscaping, painting and taking care of curb appeal and the actual staging with furniture and accessories.
Professional home stagers can put together a home staging checklist for the sellers that includes all the nitty-gritty items that need to be completed. The staging company then comes out to see the home, takes photos and measurements and then writes up a quote. A few days later, their truck and crew will reverse up the driveway and begin working with a blank canvas.
What is virtual home staging?
In recent years, another option has emerged. It’s called virtual staging. It’s the process of digitally altering a photo of a room to make it more appealing to buyers. With specialized software, the changes could range from changing paint colors to removing the furniture and replacing with ‘new’ furniture. It could be merely furnishing a new, vacant listing. Beautiful photos for the MLS or any online advertising are the result. This, in turn, attracts more buyers to view the property
Virtual home involves the listing agent emailing photos of the vacant home to an online virtual staging company. Then somebody sitting in front of a computer uses virtual staging software to Photoshop furniture and accessories onto the photos.
Voila! The home is transformed from a soulless, empty box to a home with personality.
Is It Cost-Effective?
Virtual staging costs far less than traditional home staging. The latter runs, on average, between $2,000 to $5,000 to set up the property and anywhere from $500 to $1,000 to pay for additional rental fees each month. The average cost to digitally stage real estate is between $200 and $400, depending on the company and the number of photos.
Customize any way you want
One of the benefits of virtual staging is that you can customize each home to the style and preference of your target market. This technology allows you to make the home look modern and contemporary or more traditional or perhaps even Victorian! Th0is will make the listing more appealing to the specific buyers you are trying to reach.
Being able to redecorate a room virtually allows you to take out some of the existing furnishings and redesign it in a way that will attract more of your target market. It can be easy for homeowners to overlook all their personal belongings which may only hinder the sale of the property. Through virtual declutter, you remove the distracting items to show off the actual room.
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