See How a Stager Fixed This Virtually Staged Home

Staging is often considered a very important piece to selling a home. Staged homes sell faster and often for higher than comparable homes that weren’t staged, according to the National Association of Realtors. But for those on a budget or not wanting to deal with the hassle of movers traipsing in and out of your home to move furniture around, virtual staging may seem like an enticing option. 

Virtual staging is cheaper, with some Reddit users reporting that it costs them between $24 and $35 per photo, plus a little extra for any edits. But there are downsides. For one, when potential buyers come to tour the space, your home will still be empty. This matters insofar as staging is a key way to help potential buyers imagine what each room could be used for and understand how much furniture can fit into any space. A blank slate can be too blank and leave buyers feeling overwhelmed — or underwhelmed. 

For this particular Chicago listing done by stager Molly Marino, moving from virtual to physical staging made all the difference. “The photos of the virtual staging were online for 50 days,” Marino says. “We took it off the market, staged it, and it went into contract in under a week.” Here’s what she did.

“The audience for this part of town is young professionals or folks who have a big house in the suburbs or another city, and this would serve as a second home for when they come downtown,” Marino explains. “If you think of both those demographics, those people are entertaining. They’re having people over before going out to dinner, watching football games — you need a space to actually host people.” 

The virtual staging simply didn’t accomplish this. “It really didn’t show that there was any place to live outside of the bedrooms,” Marino says. Lacking a dining table also would make it hard for buyers to imagine simply sitting down to have a meal with their family. 

For this reason, the first thing Marino did was bring in a table that could sit six people, and she made sure the living room was staged to accommodate three people on the sofa and two on some extra accent chairs. The idea was for buyers to experience the space and witness the possibility of having people over. “My goal was to show the living and dining setup without it looking cramped,” Marino recalls.

When the sellers put the house back on the market, they maintained the same $600,000 asking price that it was listed at with virtual staging, but this time, they got a contract within just the first few days on the market. Marino’s staging services cost $3,250. “In all reality,” she says, “that’s one mortgage payment.”