Author: Rachelle Moore

Over 4.95 billion people have been using the Internet worldwide, turning digital platforms into convenience, innovation, and smooth communication avenues. Most real estate professionals use the World Wide Web to connect with potential buyers, network with like-minded real estate practitioners, and market properties for sale. Multiple sites and programs can help you improve your real estate competency and conversion rates.

These days, you can accomplish a lot for your real estate listings with just a mouse click, whether virtual furniture staging or virtual staging. Moreover, you can enhance your post-production game with decluttering and editing apps requiring a few taps. Various innovations have improved the standards and processes for real estate photos.

Before we proceed further, let’s talk about virtual staging and why you should consider using it for your real estate listings.

What is Virtual Staging?

Virtual staging is a digitally-made showroom for real estate marketing and sales purposes. You can implement profiled looks and feels to a particular property and virtually stage a room to make it more presentable and aesthetically pleasing to potential buyers.

Why Should You Virtually Stage a Room?

There are many reasons to stage a home virtually. Most people want to focus on virtual staging furniture that allows them to dress up empty spaces according to exciting concepts and lifestyle pegs. Home staging came into practice long before the Internet was ever a thing, and developers used to spend thousands on physical showrooms.

These days, you can easily stage listing photos with a click of a mouse or a tap of a finger on your phone. You can improve your chances of attracting the right buyers.

How to Stage Listing Photos with a Mouse Click

You can virtually stage any listing photo even if you’re not a real estate photographer or professional graphics creative. Now that we’ve established the importance of enhancing real estate photos, here are the many ways to attractively stage your home with just a mouse click:

1. Digitally declutter images using photo editing software

Sometimes, you need to remove items, furniture pieces, personal belongings, and clutter found in the photo to add better ones. Staging opens up possibilities from your existing spaces to suit the lifestyle or image you want to project to potential customers. You don’t need to be a virtual staging expert to improve your real estate listing photographs.

Photo editing software allows you to improve your real estate pictures’ appearance by removing unwanted objects with just a few clicks, whether you’re using the classic cut-and-paste method, healing spot brush, or clone stamp tool. These techniques are pretty straightforward, especially for those with extensive photo-editing experiences.

If you can’t do it yourself and you need the help of an expert, Phixer can help declutter images with a click of your mouse.

2. Find home staging ideas online

You may want to virtually stage a room, but you don’t know where to begin. Luckily, many others have done the feat before you, and the Internet is an excellent place to search for lookbooks, inspiration, and ideas. Pinterest, for example, is a platform with many modern and traditional designs perfect for indoor and outdoor spaces.

You can search for the following information online:

• Home staging tips
• Virtual staging hacks
• Real estate listing photo examples
• Interior decoration ideas
• Furniture styles

Looking up real-life examples would immensely help the creative process if you want to have your staging professionally made. You can also show the samples to your potential clients, especially those staged with similar room sizes.

3. Try furniture using Augmented Reality (AR)

Like those dress-up apps, virtual staging furniture is a fun experience using AR technology. Famous retail brands like IKEA, Target, and Amazon have iOS and Android apps that allow you to decorate your room with pieces of furniture to scale. You can also access websites where you can upload pictures and try different types of furniture to check how it looks.

AR boasts a 90% conversion rate, and around half of the customers prefer shopping with AR assistance. You can expect better and more accessible AR technologies as ecommerce becomes more popular and people appreciate virtual illustrations more than traditional property visits.

Virtual furniture staging has become increasingly popular, especially among buyers looking for how specific furniture pieces look in the space. As better AR and VR technologies are available, people will soon hold real estate tours using VR headsets.

4. Use a Virtual Staging app or website

The best kind of staging is one made by experts. Aside from furniture apps, you can do virtual staging online through apps or websites. Companies like Phixer have a dedicated mobile app where you can capture listing photos and have them edited by experts.

Virtual staging websites can offer the same experience, especially those that allow you to save your edits instantly. You should be careful in choosing because some of those sites can be costly, especially if you don’t have a clear vision of the style you want.

5. Hire a Virtual Staging expert

Another way to digitally stage your property with just a mouse click would be to hire a virtual staging expert for post-production listing photos. If Photoshop or editing programs are too overwhelming or time-consuming, you can rely on professionals. Often, these real estate editing companies provide more than just virtual staging.

Here are some services that you can hire real estate photography and post-production experts for:

• Photo editing
• Video editing
• Drone shots
• Lawn replacement
• Decluttering
• Virtual twilight

Most companies offer 8 to 48 hours turnaround times depending on the request, and they offer consultations and customer support to ensure that you get the images you need. Some websites allow you to log in and upload your photos to monitor progress and check edit status.

Bottomline

There are many ways to approach virtual staging online, and more companies present real estate photography and post-production services. Fortunately, a lot of the current technology improves the aesthetics and appearances of regular property images. Someday, people will make quick decisions on real estate properties with digital ocular inspections.

21st-century technology has changed how we sell and promote real estate properties. Building complicated showrooms and prematurely spending on renovations are a thing of the past, and the virtual staging process has eliminated the need for elaborate setups or props.

Digital or virtual staging is the online equivalent of classic showroom techniques that improve real estate sales conversions or success rates. It’s a recent development, but home staging has been a part of long-standing real estate practices way before technology came into play.

The Real Estate Staging Tradition

Before discussing the importance of virtual staging, it’s essential to talk about staging as a practice. Simply put, staging means readying the property or home for a possible client that involves cleaning, renovating, redecorating, rearranging furniture, dressing up the emptiness, and other aesthetic strategies to attract buyers into the house.

Before the internet and virtual staging, it was physically impossible or impractical to bring customers to the site, so developers constructed showrooms strategically in malls or other busy areas. This practice costs a lot more than if they did staging digitally.

You may be wondering what is virtual staging and how does it correlate to better sales possibilities? Does it also affect property pricing?

What is Virtual Staging?

The simple virtual staging meaning is a digital showroom designed to promote a house or property. It also refers to the technique of improving a room’s appearance in preparation for listings or social media. This method allows reimagination of space to accommodate a new lifestyle even without actual furniture or renovations.

You may be wondering why use virtual staging for real estate marketing? There are several practical and aesthetic reasons for doing it.

Why Use Virtual Staging?

Virtual staging is one of the best modern real estate marketing techniques incorporating creativity and psychology into real estate photos. Be purposeful and definitive when staging real estate listing photos to ensure that you don’t waste your time and effort.

Here are some of the benefits of digital home staging:

1. Gives a preview of the property and home

One of the critical virtual staging benefits includes a preview of what living in the space looks like. The sneak peek allows customers to imagine what their daily routine would look like within the vicinity. A good marketing tactic is to adjust the room aesthetics and ambiance to suit the possible clients or buyers.

Therefore, you should stage parts of the house that the new owner would frequent. For example, if you’re attracting young professionals, they might be interested in a home office or area for a work-from-home setup. You should stage the family room, kitchen, or shared living spaces to cater to small families.

2. Cost-effective staging method

Virtual staging costs relatively less compared to home staging and creating showrooms. Aside from the lesser cost, you have improved potential of attracting sales and clients, and a higher success probability means a better return on investment.

According to a 2017 National Association of Realtors (NAR) survey, the effect of virtual staging on real estate prices is an increased sale price of 1% to 15%. If you’re selling a $300,000 home, that’s a boost of $3,000 to $45,000. Virtual staging costs are only a fraction of the price increase you can charge.

3. Save time in redecorating and decluttering spaces

There are instances when the house’s previous owners haven’t packed or removed their personal effects before the real estate photography sessions. You should deploy creative methods to improve appearances in the real estate listing photos during such times.

The virtual staging process will eliminate waiting for redecoration and reconstruction because you can digitally declutter and change the room’s features. It’s a time-saving method that gives more preparation time to the seller by allowing advanced listing.

4. Fast completion

Speed is where the importance of virtual staging shines brightest. Modern technology has improved the time needed to edit real estate photos. Many companies like Phixer offer 24-hour virtual staging services, alleviating the pain of editing images yourself.

The actual real estate purchase procedure takes a long time, from listing to site visits and paperwork, so you welcome anything that expedites the entire flow. Virtual staging improves the appearance of your photos and allows you to post your property photos without tidying or waiting for movers to clear your items.

5. More aesthetic options to choose from

The virtual staging meaning changes according to use and form. Sometimes, people utilize virtual staging as a 2D tour, and other times, it’s just a way to present several options. It all boils down to virtual spaces having more options and appeal.

Here are some ideas on how you can virtually stage your home:

• Select one neutral theme like brown or beige, and add a non-neutral color like red, green, or blue as an accent.
• Choose a piece of furniture to serve as the space’s highlight and build a motif around it.
• Digitally remove all the existing decors, and leave the room bare except for white wall paint and minimal furnishings.
• Accessorize the room. Add art pieces to bare walls and rugs to bare floors.

The sky is the limit, as long as you ensure that all 3D-rendered furniture pieces are on the right scale and that the entire room uses the correct perspective. You can also take your virtual staging to the next level by editing your sky through virtual twilight, creating a homey ambiance.

Bottomline

There are a lot of virtual staging benefits, especially when you’re dealing with high-profile and expensive properties. Weigh your options carefully, and consider the value of a digitally-staged home compared to a bare real estate property without alterations.

Customers are more likely to trust a property staged according to their preferences and lifestyle, and they may make quicker decisions when they see it in image format. The sooner they buy the virtually staged home or property, the faster you can move on to selling others.

The real estate industry heavily relies on visual appeal for sales. Most customers prefer to see clean and well-kept properties on the listing before setting an appointment to see the premises. Several agents rely on professional post-production companies like Phixer to edit real estate images suited for marketing campaigns and sales strategies.

You can market real estate properties online through several platforms, so you should make the most of the free digital exposure by editing the images beautifully. Improve conversion rates by maximizing the attractiveness of your photos. Read more to discover how to make adjustments to real estate photos for competitiveness and marketability.

Value of Marketability

Primarily, people post real estate listing photos to promote sales; therefore, marketability is at the forefront of editing considerations. Marketability is an essential design aspect because it determines the property’s sales outcome, such as failure or success.

Product marketability has two categories:

• Design for the target audience
• Advertisement for the target audience

In practice, you can virtually stage the property to suit the target home buyers or edit real estate images to advertise according to buyer psychology. Real estate marketing trends continuously adapt to changing times like the most recent COVID-19 pandemic.

Why You Should Edit Real Estate Photographs

Images will introduce possible buyers to the property, so you must consider buyer psychology when editing them. Here are the seven deciding factors according to the home buyer psychological considerations:

• Emotion – 44% purchase homes because they feel good in them.
• House with a story – closely linked to emotional attachment, clients buy homes with touching histories.
• Perceived value – clients are more likely to purchase a house with great aesthetics and condition regardless of current market value.
• Suits ideal lifestyle – since most customers spend time at home, they are more likely to buy a property appropriate to their lifestyle.
• Cultural superstitions – these often involve the kind of numbers attached to the property.
• Excellent first impressions – clean and neat real estate properties attract more buyers.
• Social proof or influence – trust and testimonials reflect credibility.

It’s important to note that most considerations don’t revolve around market values or facts and figures but the home’s appeal, emotion, and aesthetics. For example, you can invoke emotion even before the visit by posting a virtually staged listing photo.

There is a method and art to real estate graphics editing, and it’s simpler than most people would think. You can do it with Adobe Photoshop or any graphics editing or photo manipulation software.

How to Edit Real Estate Pictures

The first rule on how to make adjustments to real estate photos is maintaining its natural state unless you’re virtually staging your property. It’s essential to be as realistic as possible, especially when posting the images on listing sites and social media pages.

Here are straightforward real estate photo editing techniques:

1. Adjust Exposure

The lighting can make or break the image ambiance when you edit property photos. Overexposure, too much light, or underexposure, too little light, could ruin the overall effect of the picture. There are automatic adjustment settings that could help improve exposure.

Darkening overexposed area:

• You can use the Burn tool to darken an overexposed area.
• Set the tool as Highlights on the top menu and paint over the area you want to shade.
• Exposure default is often 50%, but you should start at 10%.

2. Adjust Levels

Levels setting allows you to manipulate the image’s color balance and tonal range by modifying image highlights, midtones, and shadows intensity levels. The histogram is a graphic guide in changing the fundamental tones of the image, and the Levels setting improves how to edit real estate pictures.

Adjusting tonal settings:

• Select Levels from the panel menu or choose the Levels icon located in the Adjustments panel.
• Pick Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Levels. Affirm your selection in the New Layer dialog box pop up.

The external input Levels indicators mark the black end and white end to the settings of the output indicators. The Output sliders mark 0, where the pixels are black, and 255 white by default. Moving the black input slider maps the pixel value to level 0, and adjusting the white point slider maps the pixel value to level 255. The remaining levels spread between levels 0 and 255, increasing the image’s tonal range and improving the overall picture contrast. The middle Input slider adjusts the image’s gamma. It moves the mid-tone (level 128) and modifies the intensity values of the mid-range of gray tones without drastically changing the shadows and highlights.

You can save Levels settings as a preset then apply them to other images.

3. Remove Clutter

Buyers want to see the house or property in its best state, so removing unnecessary objects and distractions is one way to edit property photos. You can hire a company or freelancer to remove excess objects or do it yourself.

Here are some ways to edit out unwanted items on your real estate images:

• Spot Healing Brush tool automatically samples pixels from a specific area to edit on top of the unwanted item and blend with the surroundings.
• Healing Brush tool works like Spot Healing Brush, but it allows you to select the pixels to utilize as a spot.
• Clone Stamp tool gives more coverage because it copies content from one area to a selected location without blending.
• Content-Aware workspace allows you to hide huge areas of an image, offering a live previous enabling control over the many options.

Final Thoughts

There’s no shame in doing post-production magic to get more sales. The highly-competitive real estate industry is dependent on real estate graphics editing to promote less marketable properties. However, it would help if you made an effort to remain accurate in your representation of real estate images because too much exaggeration or edits could tarnish your credibility.