How to Use Virtual Staging to Sell a Home Faster

Using virtual staging can help you sell a house significantly faster, especially if it’s a vacant property. Virtual staging is the process of creating a realistic digital rendering of a property to give potential buyers an idea of what it could look like furnished. Using virtual staging can make your home look its best and help buyers imagine themselves living there.

Keep reading to learn how to do virtual staging, what it is, and whether it’s right for your property.

What is Virtual Staging?

Virtual staging is accomplished with new smart technology that allows sellers to create digital staging examples using photos of their homes. The augmented reality programs allow you to place digital furniture and decor images in a room, providing a hypothetical mock-up of what the home could look like when fully furnished.

Although virtual staging may seem like just a gimmick, it offers several benefits to help your home sell faster. It can allow you to get creative with the marketing of a property by showing off its unique features and design potential.

For example, when staging a living room, you could add furnishings, a couch, plants, and other accessories to make the room look spacious and modern.

However, a word of warning: virtual staging is a new practice that not all homebuyers fully understand. Low-quality renderings and misleading disclosures about virtual staging can turn off buyers.

So, it’s important to seek professional advice from a local real estate agent before proceeding with virtual staging. Otherwise, it could cause more harm than good.

How to Do Virtual Staging

There are several ways to approach virtual staging. The easiest way is to start with a photo of an empty room in your home and use photo editing tools and rendering software to customize the space with images of furniture and decor. It’s not always practical to empty your entire home to prepare it for virtual staging.

In these cases, you can use partially finished images and customize them to increase their appeal. One of the most significant advantages of this method is the ability to remove unsightly aspects of the home, like worn-out furniture.

You can also edit out personal identifiers like family photos, pets, and even people who might be visible in the original photo. This is particularly helpful if you’re a landlord selling a house with tenants, as you don’t want to include their personal artifacts in the listing photos.

After cropping out the bad stuff, you can play up the positive aspects of the home in virtual staging. For example, you can use furniture and decor to accentuate the home’s best features like large windows, fireplaces, or vaulted ceilings.

You can even add special touches like a bowl of fruit on the kitchen counter or a vase of flowers in the living room to make the space feel more inviting and homey.

Create Different Designs For Different Viewers

As with any sales endeavor, understanding the wants and needs of your prospects is essential. The great thing about virtual staging is that you can create different designs to appeal to different buyers.

For example, if you’re posing your property as a family home, you might want to stage your dining room with images of comfortable furniture and child-friendly decor. If you’re leaning into a more luxurious buying market, on the other hand, you can amplify its upscale appeal with modern furniture and pricier decor.

However, transparency is more important than ever when you’re manipulating photos to appease your target buyers. If buyers are led to believe that the digital rendering is what the home looks like, they may be disappointed to see that’s not the case when they come to see the home in person.

Blend Virtual Staging With Real Staging For the Best Results

While virtual staging can be a helpful tool for marketing a property, it’s not a replacement for real-world staging. Using both tactics can work together to create an even more appealing overall picture of your home. Nothing beats the feeling a buyer gets when they walk into a perfect home for the first time.

Inversely, it’s hard to get people to come to an open house if your property isn’t well advertised. For the best results, use virtual staging to attract buyers online. Once you’ve developed legitimate interest from several parties, you can collaborate with a professional stager to prepare the home for your prospective buyers.

Summary

If you’re looking to sell your home fast, virtual staging may be the answer. Remember not to rely on it too heavily, but use it as one of many tools in your arsenal, and make sure to have some good, old-fashioned in-real-life staging done as well. By sticking to the best practices for staging a home, you can sell your home fast and leave potential buyers with a great impression.

When buyers are impressed with a property, they’re more likely to make an offer over the asking price. When this happens, you can boost your equity (and your retirement fund if you’re downsizing).

Do you need help selling your house fast? At Brotherly Love Real Estate, we buy houses as is in as little as 21 days. When you contact us, we’ll give you a fair cash offer and complete the sale as quickly as possible.