Virtual staging is a relatively new technology and there are still quite a few people out there that do not even know about it. We thought it would be helpful to offer some tips on what to look out for when choosing a virtual home stager.

Things to avoid:

1. The “cartoon affect” – You may have seen it before and with the recent advancement in technology there is no need for it. The “cartoon affect” is when a virtual staging looks like someone drew in the furniture and it does not even look real.

2. The “spot light affect” – A top quality virtual stagger should be able to match the lighting of the furniture to the lighting of the picture. A piece of furniture should not appear very bright as if spot lights are on it. This creates an unnatural look and takes away from the room by drawing attention to the furniture.

3. Shadowing – Just as in real life, even the smallest amount of light in a room will cause furniture to cast a shadow. Virtual furniture should also have a shadow.

4. Rigid furniture – Furniture should not appear rigid or choppy or have an outline around it.

5. Unethical altering - We have seen some companies that offer to “give it a new paint job, new doors, windows and beautiful landscaping.” If a virtual staging company is changing the views from a window or fixing structural damage it is likely that they will earn a bad reputation among buyers. Buyers do not like to feel deceived, if a house has serious structural problems and a seller tries to hide that from the buyer the buyer will not be happy. This can hurt your effort in selling your home and you should always work with a reputable staging company that has a clearly written code of conduct and can provide you with an authentication seal to vouch for your honesty and integrity.

6. Websites that steal – I think we can all agree that stealing is just flat out wrong. If you see a website stealing someone’s samples or copy then they most likely don’t have anything of value to offer and can not produce the same quality of work.  It’s also likely they will only take your money and not give you anything in return.

Virtual Staging Solutions is the most highly respected company in the world for virtual staging and we stand by our quality of work, ethics code and 100% money back guarantee.However, if you do decide to shop around for virtual staging we hope these tips will be helpful to you. In fact, we encourage you to shop around – we guarantee you wont see the same value and level of quality that we offer.

Click here to visit our sales page.

It has come to our attention that, since our induction, there have been many “fly-by-night” websites being setup that supposedly offer virtual staging. These  second-class websites have been stealing the wording and the samples of our work and copying it directly to their website. Professional virtual staging done at the same quality as our service will cost at least five figures for a company to successfully provide. For this reason, we are still the only photo-realistic virtual staging company. Many times other websites will steal our images and try to pass them off as their own samples. Unfortunately anyone that purchases from them will be very disappointed when they receive their photos back only to see the poor quality.

In many cases these “copycat virtual stagers” are also fraudsters, they’ll take your money and never send you the photos back.

We want to make our customers and the public aware of these copycat and fraud sites so that they are not mistaken to be affiliated with Virtual Staging Solutions and so that you do not waste your time and lose your hard earned money to a fake virtual stager.

Our legal team is also working to have these copycat websites shut down. If you notice any 3rd party websites using our images or text please report it by contacting us.

Virtual Staging Solutions

Virtual Staging Solutions offers a 100% money-back guarantee, we are verified by GoDaddy to encrypt our website and payment process and have a long-positive reputation as the industry leaders in virtual staging. Read more about us here.

What makes a great virtual staging? Find out here.

Copycats

Here is an example of a fraudulent copycat site.

“L.E.A.P.” : This site is administered from India, you’ll notice it does not look very professional and for some reason has a fishbowl in the background of the header. They also took the same photos we have in our gallery along with the exact same words on our home page and pasted them onto their site. Well… maybe if there is one thing that we didn’t, ahem, “inspire” on their website is the odd fishbowl in the background.

]]> http://virtualstagingsolutions.com/blog/copycats/feed 0 http://virtualstagingsolutions.com/blog/virtual-staging-software http://virtualstagingsolutions.com/blog/virtual-staging-software#comments Mon, 22 Feb 2010 02:48:21 +0000 Bryan http://virtualstagingsolutions.com/?p=1607

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes of virtual staging? Are you looking for a “do-it-all” software that will let you just drag and drop furniture into your photos? Well, unfortunately virtual staging isn’t that easy. Many people often ask us what software we use to do what we do. This article will shed a little light on how it’s all done. We’ve done a lot of investigating, research and development planning to find the highest quality virtual staging possible and this is what we found…

The Talent

There are a lot of things that go into a good quality virtual staging and there is no single piece of software that is capable of making the complex image manipulations on it’s own. Our most valuable resource for virtual staging is our team of talented designers. Virtual Staging Solutions employees a team of highly skilled and trained graphic designers and home stagers, that use a collection of different photo editing and 3D rendering tools on both the Mac and PC operating systems. The software we use ranges from $2,500 to $18,000, as you can imagine this can be some pretty complex software with a steep learning curve. Most of our designers have 5+ years of experience working with the software. Our designers are first required to go through a 1-3 week internal training program that allows us to assess their skills and teaches them learn how to use our collection of software.

Finding the right talent is one of our biggest difficulties, we search world-wide for designers with the skills necessary to produce the highest quality virtual staging. We have employed some amazing graphic designers with some great skills however, even some of the best graphic designers are sometimes not a fit for our service. Due to the uniqueness of virtual staging there are some design factors that our design team must account for during production, and these factors are why software is incapable of rendering the same quality.

Design Factors

We’ve seen some people claiming to sell “virtual staging software” but really all they are selling is a generic collage making software and a few furniture images with only 1-2 different angles. As you can imagine this solution will create a lot of problems when you try insert furniture at the correct perspective, an image of a couch taken from the front will not work in many rooms unless you want the couch directly in the middle of the photo without any variation in perspective or have the slightest degree of an angle.

The major design factors our designers have to account for are perspective, ensuring that the furniture matches up with the perspective and vanishing points of the room. They also need to account for light sources and consider the differences between natural and artificial light and how it will cast onto the furniture in the room to create highlights.

The light sources also play a major role in determining shadows and shadows are one of the most important factors in creating a realistic effect. Most generic graphic design tools and collage software can not make shadows or if they can, they can only make simple drop shadows that makes the furniture look like it has a black glow around it. This type of software is also not capable of evaluating the lighting of a room which is why they will cause the finished product to look like a cartoon instead of being photo-realistic.

This is why we’ve created our virtual staging service, to take all of the complex, hard work out of virtual staging for you. Simply send us your photos and you’re done, for only $197 you can get started today.

These are just a few of the hundreds of factors that need to be addressed during virtual staging, we hope this article answers the questions you have about virtual staging software and also sheds a light on the thought process and hard work that goes into what our designers do to provide you with the highest quality of virtual staging.

Still have a question? Liked this article? Leave us a comment below…

Exhibitor Showcase Times:
3/7/2010 – 4pm-7pm
3/8/2010 – 11pm-4pm
3/9/2010 – 11pm-1pm

Attending? RSVP on our Facebook Event.

1. Social Media Package – With hundreds of subscribers in the real
estate industry, we figured we would share them with you. Now,
every time you order 4 or more photo’s we will announce your
listing on our Twitter and Facebook accounts and include a link to
your website. Our testing has found this to be a great way to get
your listing in front of as many prospects as possible.

2. Featured Broadcast Package – This one I still can not believe we
are giving away for free, but I know it will really pay off when
you see the value our featured broadcast package can provide. In
this package, when you order 5 or more photos we will create a
separate page on our website with your listing information, photos
and contact information. If you do a search right now on Google for
“Virtual Staging” you will notice that we come up in the #1
position. This is exactly what we have decided to share with you.
When we link to your listing and your website, it will increases
your chances of getting your website or your listing information
higher on Google searches.

We also now accept PayPal and Google Checkout to a make our
order process even easier and more convenient for you.

If you have a vacant property for sale, come check out all of the
new, innovative solutions that can help you sell it twice as fast:
http://virtualstagingsolutions.com

Talk to you soon,
Bryan
Virtual Staging Solutions
www.VirtualStagingSolutions.com
Ph: 888-201-9042

P.S. Does your real estate office know about virtual staging? We’ll
give a free webinar at your next office meeting and even pay you a
commission of any sales. Contact us or leave a comment below for details.

P.P.S. I want to hear your opinions. Do you think we should include
something else with our virtual staging service? What problems are
you having with selling real estate? Leave me some suggestions
here: http://virtualstaging.uservoice.com/

• New web design & refreshed logo – We’re making our website even more user friendly and easy to navigate.
• New marketing services to help you sell your listings even faster.
• New pricing structure & packages
• Contests – We’ll be launching some contests that will give you the chance to win some great prizes.
• New payment methods – We’ll be introducing Google checkout and Paypal as new payment methods on our website.
• Social media improvements – We’ll be updating our social media pages with all kinds of great content so be sure to join us on Facebook and Twitter.
• Blog Posts – You’ll start to see some great content on our blog and guests posts from industry experts.

We have a few more “top secret” projects that are still in the works and hope we can continue to keep improving our services for you. Have a suggestion or want to see something that wasn’t mentioned here than let us know in the comments below.

On behalf of everyone at Virtual Staging Solutions, Happy New Year! We’re going to make this a great year.

New web design sneak preview

Logo Sneak Preview

Booth #926 – Across from the Cyber Lounge: http://screencast.com/t/MjI0YjhjZm

https://virtualstagingsolutions.com/dashboard/clientarea.php

Please note you will need the email address and password you chose when you applied in order to log in.

Here are a few important points to help you get started…

Your unique affiliate link to promote is shown in your affiliate account in a box that looks like this:

1. Every time someone goes to that link and purchases within 60 days of visiting that link you will receive a 25% commission on our package of 3-6 photos. Please note that you will not receive a commission on your own orders, our affiliate program is only for those that wish to refer OTHER people to us.

2. Friendly URL’s: You are free to create your own custom URL by having another URL forward to your affiliate link. For example, if you would like ww.YourWebsite.com/virtualstaging all you have to do is set that up on your own website to forward to your affiliate link.

Another easy way to go about setting up a custom link would be to go to www.godaddy.com, register any domain name that you would like to use and in your account settings set the domain to forward to your affiliate link.

Note: If you would like a custom link on our domain, e.g. virtualstagingsolutions.com/jdoe, please submit a ticket at our support desk  at http://virtualstagingsolutions.com/contact and we will try to accommodate you. Please include what link ending you would like to have.

3. Printed Materials: If you would like brochures with your affiliate link and your contact information on them we will design them for you with your link and your contact information on the back at no additional charge for the design work. We can then supply you with the digital format for you to have printed.

We recommend www.VistaPrint.com for printing, they are a low-cost easy solution that will print a nice full color 3-fold brochure and send them to you. If you do decide to go with a different printing company, we do require that you print our brochures only in color for quality control reasons. We also have a special link (virtualstagingsolutions.com/vistaprint) for up to 90% off vista print products. Please contact us if you would like the templates at:
http://virtualstagingsolutions.com/contact

We can also provide you with a business card template upon your request.

I hope that answers some of your questions. If you have any further questions please visit http://virtualstagingsolutions.com/contact

We look forward to working with you!

Virtual Staging Solutions
Affiliate Management Team
www.VirtualStagingSolutions.com
Ph: 888-201-9042

Virtual Staging Solutions, the most highly respected company in the world
for virtual staging; employs only the most talented artists and designers
from all over the world. Their goal is to harness the power of technology
and provide affordable, fast and convenient home staging without the hassle
of renting and moving in and out furniture.

Founded in 2008, Bryan Bittner and Dennis Miller combined their years of
marketing, advertising and design experience with one goal in mind: to build
a remarkable company that uses today¹s technology to take photos sent to
them and warm up the home by putting almost any type of furniture in the
photo so that it appears as if the furniture is actually in the home!
With a history and reputation of using only top-quality furniture, they’ve
become an even stronger force in the staging world by announcing a
partnership with Ashley Furniture, who in less than 10 years, have become
the No. 1 selling furniture brand in the world and the No. 1 retailer of
furniture and bedding in the United States.

“We constantly get asked by our clients and the new home owners where they
can purchase the furniture we use in our photos. Now, this partnership with
Ashley Furniture will give them a place to complete their dream home.” Says
Dennis Miller, Co-Owner of Virtual Staging Solutions.

For additional information on virtual home staging visit
www.VirtualStagingSolutions.com or contact: Dennis Miller at 888-201-9042

photo credit: minneapolis

We often get the question “how can I make my photographs look better?” and we thought this video and these tips would help anyone that wants to take better pictures.

Check it out and leave a comment below to let us know what you think.

[See post to watch Flash video]

1. Take the picture from the corner of the room.
2. Avoid having bright lights or windows near the center of the picture.
3. Set your camera to take the brightest and “cleanest” pictures.
4. If you can choose the resolution your camera shoots try to choose the highest resolution possible. The higher the resolution, the better the picture.
5. If there are any lights in the room turn all of them on.
6. Shoot directly across the room, not up or down.
7. Use a tripod if available to prevent any motion blur.
8. Wide angle shots usually look better to home buyers, however try to avoid the “fish bowl” look, as these will not work with virtual staging and can make the picture look awkward.

Have you come across other tips, tricks or strategies to taking better real estate pictures? Leave a comment below and let us know!