Cost Effective Uses Of Virtual Staging:
Staging a home for lease or sale can be a very daunting and costly proposition. The expense to hire a home staging professional plus,the expense to rent home staging furniture, artwork, and furnishings for months or perhaps weeks on end can put a tough burden on the homeowner’s minds.
What is the answer? Welcome to “Virtual Home Staging”. This new process is really making real-estate agents and homeowners alike take notice and has many advantages.
What are the advantages? To start with, the expense to the homeowner for staging a home can range from $2,000 to $20,000 dollars. Virtual staging can be 10% of the cost of traditional home staging. The time and expense required to stage a home is virtually reduced to almost zero. And finally, studies of Internet shopping and research show that between 87% and 93% of all online sales involved some kind of Internet research!
So what is virtual staging and how can it help you?
Virtual Staging follows the same idea as traditional home staging and is most commonly used for vacant houses. The basic premise is a realtor or broker will have a professional photographer or a home stager with photographic experience to take pictures of each room in the house. A virtual home stager will then take these images and re-master them to include different stylish home décor and furniture pieces, beautiful area rugs, and other art and decorative items into the pictures of a vacant room or an entire house so buyers can get a better idea of the potential of the vacant property as their future home. This helps create a ‘lived in’ and an ‘at home’ appeal to any potential buyer. If you have looked at homes before then you no doubt know how hard it can be to imagine yourself in any given home. This is where virtual home staging can really be a major benefit.
Nearly 85% of future home buyers say that a home’s decor or the staging are the key factor when viewing a home’s photos. Home staging photos that don’t look realistic can do more harm than good in the sale process. Home staging can have its negatives. Some unexperienced virtual staging firms will place oddly oriented, asymmetrical, or very unrealistic furnishings in the room and home causing the photos to look unrealistic which will only serve to distract the viewer. The ultimate effect would be the potential buyer is unable to see themselves living in the home. With Virtual Staging, the most significant value brought to the potential buyer is that it is real and helps them picture the property as their future home.
Homeowners and especially 
real estate agents and brokers now understand the need to professionally stage a home for sale. Whether staging an occupied home or a vacant home due to foreclosure or relocation, home staging has become the ultimate and best-kept tactic to insuring a successful sale.
One caution however, please be very careful to only use a professional virtually staged company. Many of the so-called online virtual staging companies are more or less technology gurus with little or no real experience with home staging. The result of selecting one of these online technology based firms would be the equivalent of using a moving company to stage your home. We doubt the end result would be acceptable. Always ask what their real experience and knowledge of home staging is.
Virtual staging is a cost effective way to increase the marketability of your listings. It gives buyers a reason to love the photos of your property and see themselves in their new home. And that puts you on the road to renting and selling faster and for top dollar too.
Be sure to contact us today to see how we can help you with your listings!