A look at how a room looks after it was virtually staged, and before.
Staging is a valuable way to help prospective buyers wrap their heads around how an empty space becomes a home, as Cyberhomes.com blogger Lauren Baier Kim shared earlier this week in her post on affordable ways to stage your home. As she mentioned, the new incarnation of this proven real estate marketing strategy is virtual staging. Gotta say I think this is an idea whose time has come.
Builders have been using this technology for several years as a way to cut the cost of building model homes and design centers. There were a lot of "I dunno know about this" comments within the industry when it first popped up, but it offers some particularly powerful tools in helping buyers see how as-yet-unbuilt houses will look, or how their furniture would fit into a floor plan. The more information you put in the buyers' hands, the more comfortable they feel about their decision.
It's only been in the last couple of years, however, that virtual staging has expanded into the realm of home staging, and it's flown completely under the radar until now. It's popped up all over the place in articles in the past couple of weeks.
I think it's a terrific fit for an existing-home seller with a vacant property. I really wish I'd known about this when my husband and I were trying to sell a house we had rehabbed for resale. The living room, in particular, would have benefited from a designer suggesting how to make the best use of the space. I would have used virtual staging in a heartbeat.
It works, I think, for a couple of reasons. Nearly everyone these days starts their search for a new home online. People spend a huge amount of their search time looking at photos of houses, and photos of empty rooms are not particularly interesting.
Staging a house is a great way to help prospective buyers visualize how a house lives, but it's not cheap -- you can easily spend a few thousand dollars to stage a house properly. Several companies offer virtual staging, though, for a few hundred dollars; you send them good quality photos and dimensions of your rooms and they digitally insert furniture and accessories that work well in the space.
I cruised through Web sites for Virtually Staging Properties and Virtual Staging Solutions and the images are just amazing. They really let the viewer see how furniture would look in the rooms. It hit me immediately when I looked at a dining room with an image of a table with six chairs -- the same size dining room table that I have in my house.
If there's a danger in virtual staging, it's that some viewers might not understand that what they're looking at isn't real, and feel like they've been deceived. I think the risk of this is highest if the virtual staging included changing the wall colors or adding light fixtures or window treatments, which many times are included in a house. A simple disclaimer on the listing would take care of that, though.
I'd love to hear from sellers who have used virtual staging, or buyers who looked at house listings that featured it, and get their thoughts on how it works in real life. Make that virtual life. —Pat Curry