Virtual Staging for Austin Listings

Why Empty Rooms Are Hard To Sell

Digitally furnished rooms for empty Austin listings, at a fraction of what physical staging costs. Every virtually staged image can be clearly labeled to help you meet applicable disclosure requirements.

An empty room is hard to sell. Buyers are bad at estimating scale in a bare space, they cannot tell whether their sofa fits, and an unfurnished gallery reads as a house nobody wants rather than one nobody has moved into yet. Vacant listings sit longer, and every week of sitting costs the seller more than staging would have.

Physical staging fixes it for thousands of dollars a month in this market, plus scheduling and a truck. Virtual staging fixes most of it for a fraction of that, on the photos you were already paying for.

Before After

What good virtual staging looks like

Three things separate staging that works from staging that gets laughed at in the comments:

• Scale. The furniture has to be the right size for the actual room. A sectional dropped into a 10 by 12 space reads instantly as fake and, worse, makes the room look smaller than it is.
• Light. Shadows and highlights on the furniture have to match the window light in the photograph. This is the detail cheap staging always misses.
• The floor plane. Furniture legs have to sit on the floor at the right perspective. Anything floating, and the whole image collapses.

We stage to the room in the photograph rather than dropping a stock template on top of it, and we pick furniture that matches what a buyer for that property would plausibly own. A mid century set in a downtown loft, something warmer in a Georgetown family home.

Virtual removal, as well as staging

Half the requests we get are the opposite of staging: take something out. A dated recliner, a cluttered kitchen counter, a wall of family photographs, a car on the driveway. In an occupied home, removing the two or three things pulling attention away from the room usually does more than adding anything would.

Where virtual staging works hardest

Vacant residential listings first, and new construction almost always, since a spec home has never been furnished and a buyer is being asked to imagine an entire life in an empty shell. It also does real work on short term rentals being set up before the furniture lands.

Staging pairs naturally with twilight photography, which is why both sit in the same tier of our packages: one fixes the inside of an empty house, the other fixes an exterior shot at the wrong time of day.