Virtual Staging: What do you know about it?

Recently, I’ve done a survey about How frequently photographers use Virtual Staging Service for their real estate photos. The survey was done on over 100 photographers online. The result I got is quite surprising! 62,1% photographers don’t offer it for their clients and 15,7% photographers don’t belive that their clients know about virtual staging. So today I write this article to share my little knowledge about Virtual Staging for those who have no idea about it.

WHAT IS VIRTUAL STAGING?

Virtual staging is a type of home staging. However, instead of using real furniture to add into the empty rooms, virtual staging totally uses computer-generated furniture to add into the photos of the vacant rooms. All are done on the photos, therefore, there is no actual changes in the real empty rooms.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF VIRTUAL STAGING?

As mentioned above, virtual staging is a type of home staging. Therefore, it shares the same benefit in helping home buyers visualize the vacant houses easily. However, Virtual Staging also contains some benefits over the physical staging:

Save cost and labor: All changes of the vacant rooms are done on the computer. Therefore, you wont have to pay thousands dollar for furniture rental. Just need to pay around $25 – 50$ per image.

Flexibility: Virtual staging creates the flexibility for users through some mouse clicks. Unlie physical staging, to change the style of the room, it takes time and effort to rearrange the heavy furniture. With virtual staging, the designers just need to click mouse then the whole room will be changed.

Be unique: On the market, there are numerous of gorgeous real esate photographs. How can your photos of empty room can be outstanding from them. However, if you apply virtual staging on your photos, you can show for the potential buyers both empty room and furnished room. From that, the buyers can make their own comparision and be able to imagine how the room could match their furniture.

VIRTUAL STAGING CONTAINS POTENTIAL RISK

Although Virtual Staging can bring many benefits for users, it also contains potential risk which users should be aware of.

The potential risk I want to mention here is the misrepresentation. Virtual staging is applied without any actual changes in the empty rooms. Then the buyers may feel disappointed when they realize the real home is not as what they looked on the listings. As a result you might be involved into lawsuit.

So how to get rid of this problem?

It is pretty easy to avoid this problem if you pay a little attention to it. By making it clear that this listing has been virtually staged on the description and showing off both before and after images of the empty room, you will let your potential buyers understand.

Hope this information is useful somehow. If you have any further informations about Virtual Staging, please share

I am Amy from Vietnam. I am working as a retoucher at Beat Color - the leading real estate photo editing company in Vietnam.