Virtual Home Staging

The buzzword for the next 10 years? Virtual Home Staging.

Virtual Home Staging is a digital computer process that adds furniture and accessories to empty rooms, such as the one on the left. If time and budget do not permit actual home staging with real furnishings, then, the theory goes, the next best thing is to "doctor" up the photos of the empty rooms in a 'for sale' home with digital furniture.

Glossy home magazines have, for years, been digitally altering professional photos of beautiful homes. An embellished floral arrangement here, take out power lines that you can see through the window there, a removed carpet stain here, a burnt out chandelier bulb there....you get the picture. And, we won't even go into the lengths that fashion magazines go to make the stars on their covers look flawless. This manipulation of photos is mostly done with a program called Photoshop and it's a wonderful Adobe product that we've used for a decade.

Real estate professionals who have empty home listings use virtual home staging to make homes more appealing for online listings and brochures. Prospective buyers generally have very little imagination when it comes to visualizing how a room could live for them. Putting furniture in the room digitally makes the photos more appealing to the viewer. Just as real home staging shows how a room can be used with actual furniture, virtual home staging accomplishes the same task for photos of empty homes.

Just as with any new technology, there are those that abuse the process. For example, adding landscaping to the exterior of a new home to make the environs look more mature is a misrepresentation because landscaping is customarily sold with the home. Another example of misuse might be adding mouldings to a library shot -- mouldings are an upgrade that makes a home more valuable. Furniture, however, is usually not sold with a home, so adding it digitally is not misrepresenting the features in the home that are being sold.

There are limitations as to what benefits virtual home staging can do for you. If it helps your property stand out from other empty homes in your area in online ads, then it is probably a good thing. But once a buyer sees your online representation, and then walks into your empty home, there may be some backlash. It might be perceived as a trick. One thing you can do to minimize this backlash is to clearly mark photos that have been virtually staged as such -- especially in online ads.

Also, most homes look better in person (if they've been staged properly) than they do in pictures because pictures cannot possibly give off the same feeling and emotions that actually being in a room does. If a home looks better in photos (that have been virtually staged) than it does in person, it may leave an underwhelming impression on the potential buyer. They are buying a three-dimensional home, not a two-dimensional photo. The experience of walking in a home and being swept off your feet is what buyers will buy. We've never seen anyone buy a home because of a picture -- at least not for years!

The key benefits of virtual staging are price and speed. There aren't any reliable statistics yet on if, in fact, virtual staging sells homes quickly or get more showings.

Like any new technology or service, virtual staging will need to provide a return on investment in order for it to match the success of staging homes with real furnishings.

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