Virtual Staging

Virtual staging is a powerful real estate marketing and visualization tool, where professional CAD (computer assisted design) artists add digital furniture and decor to empty or outdated spaces.

You can use virtual staging to add modern, fresh furniture and decor to empty or outdated spaces, declutter and depersonalize rooms, and perform virtual renovations, landscaping, or redecorations.

Virtual staging allows you to leverage the enormous power of visualization. It helps buyers see the potential of a property and imagine themselves living in the home.

For example, you can use virtual staging to add modern, fresh furniture and decor to empty or outdated spaces, declutter and depersonalize rooms, and perform virtual renovations, landscaping, or redecorations. There are no limits to what you can do with virtual staging!

PhotoUp’s professional virtual staging costs 20 credits ($20-$32 depending on your plan), with discounts available when you purchase credits in bulk.

The turnaround time of virtual staging is 48 hours or less.

There is also the ability to Rush batches based on the following Rush options:

• 24 Hour Rush = +5 credit per image

It works much like traditional home staging, but without having to physically add furniture and decor to the home. Instead, you virtually stage the space using digital furniture which only costs a fraction of regular home staging (typically 97% less) and can be done in less than 48 hours instead of the days/weeks it can take to physically stage a home.

At PhotoUp, we pride ourselves on returning your edited photos back to you on time. However, in certain circumstances, batches might be returned late depending on the complexity of edits or queue volume.

In order to be fair to our clients, your edits will be credited to your PhotoUp account in the following manner any time an address is delivered past the quoted delivery time:

• All PhotoUp clients will receive a 1% refund for every 15 minutes that a batch is delivered after 24 hours.
• All Rush fees will be refunded if a Rush batch is delivered after the estimated deadline.

Yes! We accept photos taken from professional or consumer cameras so long as the resolution is sufficiently high.

You can submit your photos in either JPG or PNG. For best results, try to upload a high resolution photo.

No. After you’ve placed your virtual staging order in your PhotoUp account, our expert design team will virtually stage your photos for you.

Of course! PhotoUp has the most extensive online furniture library, including 11 different design styles from Scandinavian to Luxury interior design, as well as 14 room types and 20 accessory/decor types to choose from.

The most common practice is to stage empty or vacant spaces. More specifically, the three most popular rooms to stage are the living room, master bedroom, followed by dining and kitchen areas.

While these are the most common, it really depends on each space and what are the selling points of each area in that space. It is becoming increasingly popular to use virtual staging in other rooms like at home gyms, kids rooms, and outdoors spaces.

Additionally, you can use virtual staging mixed with photo editing to declutter and depersonalize photos (remove cars from driveways, magnets from fridges, family photos on the wall, etc), as well as show how a room would look like when redecorated, painted, or even fully renovated.

For newer (or older homes), you can add appliances, flooring and lighting which is not yet installed and even landscapes can be virtually staged to boost curb appeal and visualization.

Absolutely! All you have to do is pick a furniture style and a professionally designed furniture set for your room. After uploading your images, you can also add design instructions on each individual photo or in the “Add order note” section in the top menu.

If you don’t have special design requirements, you can just leave these fields blank and PhotoUp’s design professionals will do all of the design work for you.

Virtual staging saves agents and sellers both time and money as compared to traditional staging. It can also attract more online buyer interest and help contribute to higher offers.

Best yet, virtually staging empty spaces help prospective homebuyers visualize the space better and imagine themselves living in the home. In other words, it helps showcasing the home’s full potential.

PhotoUp has a team of professional designers ready to turn your dull photos into captivating real estate photos to help you sell your listing faster and for more money.

At a high level, virtual staging artists create interiors in specific styles by adding or removing furniture, editing colors, wall paint, accessories, lighting, and other elements in a given space to make it look like an inviting home.

On a more detailed level, most virtual staging artists use special AutoCAD or similar virtual staging software to create a 3D map of a 2D photo, creating a digital 3D space over an image.

Once this 3D space is created, the artist can place pre-designed 3D digital furniture files and position and scale them accurately to the 2D photo’s angles and room dimensions.

Next, the realism of a scene comes from placing 3D light sources on the newly added digital furniture that would otherwise look flat and noticeably fake without them. Finally, 3D virtual staging requires rendering, a very computational and time intensive process typically completed on large networked computers known as render farms to produce the final, high resolution image.

If that sounds complicated, it is! It often takes years for a company to build out custom furniture sets and train their teams in the advanced software required to produce photorealistic virtual staging. It’s a blend of both technical skills and also artistic staging skills of traditional interior design.

This complexity is largely why there are not a lot of DIY virtual staging apps for smartphones or computers, and the few that are available are either expensive or equally as complex. Hence the proliferation of online services that take the complexity out, saving you money and a whole lot of time.

In almost every case the answer is yes, however, you may have to add specific disclosures depending on your local MLS. PhotoUp offers the option to add a text that says ‘virtually staged’ to your virtually staged images to make them compliant, as your local MLS may require, which is also best practice.

You can find more information in our article about MLS-compliant virtual staging.

Getting started with PhotoUp’s virtual staging service is easy!

All you need to do is sign up for a PhotoUp account, upload your photos, choose your desired style and furniture, and we’ll return your virtually staged images in less than 48 hours.

To see how easy it is to get started, check out our virtual staging image uploader video tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24YM5l8BhNo&t=4s

Or, visit this step-by-step tutorial on how to virtually stage an image.

Nope. You only pay a one-time staging fee to get your images virtually staged by PhotoUp, and after that, you’re free to use them as you’d like and for how long as you’d like.

No need to worry…PhotoUp offers two free revisions to make sure you are happy with your final product. Additional revisions are 10 credits each.

Yes. PhotoUp is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with a team of professional virtual staging artists and real estate photo editors in the Philippines.