Most people shop online, even those looking to buy houses or properties for themselves and their families, and it’s challenging to get real estate exposure with the intense competition online. Virtual staging is one of the most effective ways to improve your home and property appearance in preparation for real estate marketing efforts. It’s a great tool to enhance and show an area’s untapped potential.
Read more to know about real estate marketing and how effective virtual staging acts as a tool between the audience and seller.
Real Estate Marketing
Marketing is a campaign to promote a unique selling proposition and establish brand trust and retention. Most practitioners deploy various strategies since marketing is a means to an end; it all boils down to closing a sales deal with a client in real estate. Having repeat customers and testimonials would be considered a bonus or proof of a widely-successful campaign.
You may ask yourself, how important is staging a house? To answer that question, we should start with why people take photos for real estate listings in the first place. As much as putting a for sale sign in the front yard would gain attention, there’s no better lead generation than a digital platform. Getting leads will soon turn to interest, eventually landing a sale or closing the deal.
Here are the results of staging effectiveness in real estate marketing efforts:
1. Virtual staging solutions sell your property faster
The real estate industry is highly competitive and fast-paced, so it’s a red flag if a specific property has been in the market for too long. Sometimes, the agent or seller may reduce the price to land a sale, so getting real estate photo editing and virtual staging saves them those price cuts.
Real estate photo editors resort to techniques like photo manipulation to embellish a property image. However, it would be hard to imagine living in a house based on someone else’s preferences, and it may even feel like trespassing when you look at listing photos of family homes and see their personal effects in full view.
Most buyers want properties that they can customize to their liking. You’d get rid of the personal belongings currently in the house when you complete your sale anyway. Virtual home staging gives your property a head start so that future buyers can envision what their home would look like in your space.
How effective is virtual staging in selling your property faster? According to a survey by the National Association of Realtors (NAR) entitled 2021 Profile of Home Staging, 82% of buyers could effortlessly imagine a staged image as their future residence, and 41% were more willing to visit a home they’ve seen online.
2. Showcase best features before a site visit
Every sale goes through some form or variation of a sales funnel, and transactions in the real estate industry are no different. Once a real estate property is up for sale, the sellers often contact real estate agents or companies to help them through the sales funnel.
A sales funnel has many variations: lead generation, call, follow-up, conversion and sale or opportunity, connection, timing, obstacles, and persistence. Whichever you use, as mentioned earlier, the explicit goal is landing a deal and making a profit.
Here are the guiding principles of the sales funnel with hypothetical scenarios to illustrate each step:
- Awareness – someone sees the property for sale on a listing platform.
- Interest – the prospect contacts the number on the listing and talks to the agent or seller for a site visit.
- Decision – the viewer checks out the house and asks about specifics.
- Action – the client makes the purchase and processes the necessary paperwork.
Every marketing practitioner knows AIDA by heart, and it’s a great way to remember what you need to do first. You can develop awareness virtually anywhere these days, especially with so many social media platforms available, like Instagram or Tiktok.
Virtual staging helps immensely with lead generation or creating opportunities by showcasing potential and possibilities before an actual client site visit. A well-staged home can turn awareness into interest quickly enough, leaving only two steps to chance.
3. Clients trust real estate listings with attractive and staged homes
Repetition is the primary goal for real estate agents or home sellers. You will know how effective virtual staging is when you get repeat customers. A successfully staged property will still look genuine, even if edited virtually, so you should still do your best to clean up the actual property.
Clients satisfied with your service or product will recommend you to their family and friends. However, their network will still try to assess your compatibility with their needs, even if their close friend recommended you. Virtual staging solutions will add credibility to your authority as a real estate expert because it will appear that you only cater to high-quality real estate properties.
4. Virtual staging solutions allow you to compete with other similar listings
Real estate listings house thousands of real estate lands, homes, and properties at any given time. It’s safe to say that your images will compete with hundreds of similar properties or houses as soon as they’re posted. Without virtual staging, your house and its rooms will look worn and run down.
The same NAR study asked real estate agents whether staging, photos, videos, and virtual tours were much less important, less important, equally important, more important, or much more important for listings. Due to the global events in 2020, 83% of them think it’s necessary to have property photos, 74% videos, and 73% virtual tours.
This portion highlighted that 90% of respondents believed staging ranged from equally important to much more important, which could mean they think that part of staging effectiveness gives your property a competitive edge in the listing.
5. Virtual staging improves the price
Always remember that there are listing websites to cater to buyers who want to see everything with their own eyes. The buyer prefers something that looks good even if they know the product or item is second-hand, and the same principle applies to buying homes. Even if the appliances or furniture won’t be there upon sale, it helps improve the room’s appearance and contents before posting the photos online.
How important is staging a house? According to NAR, home staging improves your selling price by an average of $40,000 over the asking price. Sometimes, you could end up with more profits just because you made the call to stage the bedroom or kitchen photos. Selling your house without having to cut the price or even generating more profit than expected is a huge win.
6. Virtual staging increases the conversion chance
A successful marketing campaign’s conversion rate is an essential key performance indicator (KPI) because it’s the percentage of buyers doing specific actions. In real estate marketing, the conversion rate may refer to how many listing viewers visit the home or how many viewing clients buy the property.
It’s one thing to post a dozen property pictures and another to turn those viewers into homebuyers. Attracting client visits is an excellent first step to making a sale. When a potential buyer visits the property from your listing, you’ve already made the first conversion from viewer to inquiry.
Conversion rate is the most accurate marketing success measurement, and virtual staging effectively improves the chance of getting noticed, eventually turning into a closed deal.
7. Higher return on investment value
Virtual staging improves returns because it costs significantly less than traditional staging methods. You only need competent editors to get things done and increase your chances of sales rather than when you post unedited and unprocessed phone photos.
The real estate agent commission in the United States is around 4 to 6%, and the average home price is about $428,700. For the sake of computing the potential profit, let’s take $16,000 or 4% of $400,000. Most virtual staging companies charge $10 to $100 depending on the service types.
Virtual staging solutions often only cost a fraction of what the property fetches on the market. Even a real estate agent’s commission could get digital staging done for several properties and still profit over a hundred times the service costs.
Like most investments, having real estate editing and staging may not always look solid in the first few tries. However, with high real estate values, getting at least one buyer will already give you excellent returns.
Bottomline
In conclusion, how effective is virtual staging as a real estate marketing method? It’s very effective in offering a competitive edge and profitability. In the past, real estate professionals have been practicing home staging in showrooms spending hundreds to thousands of dollars to put the home in the spotlight.
Virtual staging offers a better way to showcase properties without excessive preparation and spending. Real estate editing companies like Phixer deliver speedy turnaround times to ensure you can list your home or property quickly.
