Staging your listings across the city can be a time-consuming, expensive, and cumbersome process. The logistics required to properly stage a single home are without a doubt complicated enough to place unneeded stress on both clients and agents.

Turning to technology to showcase homes is becoming more popular as many in large cities (i.e. New York City) have realized their desire to move outside to areas like the Hamptons. Research shows this isn’t a new trend. It’s been in the works since 2017 and the pandemic only accelerated it. According to Realtor, searches for homes in suburban zip codes were up 13% as of May 2020.

Lucky for us, a relatively new service called virtual home staging has emerged that will save you and your clients time and money. This is just one innovation in the realm of connecting with clients online. Let’s take a closer look at the process of virtual staging real estate as well as some of the perks it offers.

What Is Virtual Staging?

Virtual home staging is a type of property staging where interior design looks are created virtually via graphic design rather than with the use of real furniture and accessories. Virtual staging is gaining rapid popularity among real estate brokers, photographers, and interior designers. The main goal of this kind of visualization is to create highly realistic images of interiors and exteriors, at a much more affordable cost to clients.

With virtual staging, you can forget about transporting heavy furniture and décor between homes, just to re-enact the same process a thousand times for various clients. With the help of a professional virtual stager or virtual staging software, you can uniquely and tastefully decorate a property that will appeal to the masses.

Attract Online Shoppers

Emerging technology has resulted in an increasingly larger amount of transactions now taking place online. Consumers are no longer limiting their online activity to purchasing small items such as new shoes or books. Studies now show that about half of prospective buyers would first search online for their ideal home before exploring physical listings and making a substantial purchase.

With this in mind, what better way to capture their attention than by presenting them with a beautifully staged listing to explore from the comfort of their own home. This is an especially important concept for those looking to buy or rent from out of town. Virtual home staging will allow buyers to creatively envision the space and will entice them to take the next step towards a purchase.

Faster Sales At More Affordable Prices

That’s right, your listing will sell quicker. Properties that are professionally staged are shown to sell much faster than homes that are listed “as is”. Virtual staging is the perfect way to take advantage of this without the stress of movers, storage rentals, and bringing in new furniture.

At the end of the day, all business transactions come down to cost. By offering virtual staging services as a real estate firm, you can literally save your clients thousands of dollars! Let’s break it down:

On average, it will cost sellers $2500 per month to stage an apartment in New York City the traditional way. And as of February 2020, a home for sale in New York stays on the market for an average of 54 days.

In contrast, virtual staging typically costs between $39 to $199 per room, as a one-time cost.

A no-brainer, right?

The pandemic has also accelerated the number of buyers making home-buying decisions purely based on listings. In November and December 2020, 63 percent of home buyers made an offer on a house they hadn’t seen in person. Even as the vaccine encourages cities to open up, we don’t see this statistic drastically changing. The millennial home buyers, now the largest U.S. population segment, are comfortable using technology to make large purchasing decisions.

Showcase Property Potential

Potential buyers often have a hard time seeing past the previous owner’s possessions when looking to purchase a home. Eccentric decorating or unflattering wall color is enough to turn some buyers off completely from a property. The great thing about virtual home staging is that professional stagers can digitally remove existing furniture and replace it with clean, minimalistic alternatives that really show off and highlight a space.

As mentioned above, virtual staging gives buyers the opportunity to see each room’s full potential and imagine their own belongings in the space. You have the ability to remove distractions and subliminally suggest how amazing the house could look after they buy it.

The benefits of virtual staging are impactful and this is a service that you should consider offering at your firm. Sellers will be flocking to you to list their homes as virtual staging reduces stress, saves money, and sells properties faster.  

We can help strengthen your original listing with high-quality aerial video and imagery. Your impressive listing attracts the buyer and the virtual staging sells. Name a better duo.

Contact us to learn how to increase your buyer inquires by over 400%!

Long Island, NY

631-223-8574

gino@elevateyourlisting.com

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