View our entire furniture collection at: VirtualStagingSolutions.com/furniture

Automatic QR codes with Virtual Staging

We’ve implemented QR codes for all of your virtually staged listings automatically. Here’s how they work:

When your virtually staged photos are complete, we’ll send you a presentation page containing your photos and listing information. You are able to edit the information on this page instantly. Here’s an example of the presentation page.

Embedded on printer friendly pages

You’ll notice a “Print” button at the top of the presentation page. This is a printer friendly flyer that you or your clients can print out so they have all of the property information, address and photos with them wherever they need to go. On this printer friendly page will be a QR code that they can then scan with their phone and it will automatically open up their GPS application and provide them with a map and directions to the property.

Use cases

Real estate agents have been handing out these printer friendly pages at open houses, client meetings and for advertising purposes. Potential buyers have been using them to print right before leaving to see the property so they have all the information they need right in front of them. Simply scan the QR code and they have real-time information on how to get to the showing!

Pretty cool right? What are your thoughts, have you scanned a QR code before? Leave a comment below.

In the world of email and digital conversations it can sometimes be difficult to understand how the person on the other end is feeling. This was important to us. We really want to know how our customers are feeling when they email us so we can understand how we can help them better and improve our service. This little box (inspired by wufoo) let’s you choose from a few emotional states when contacting us: Happy, Excited, Worried, Upset, Confused, Angry.

This feature has been surprisingly used by the majority of people that email us. With this information we are able to understand and respond to your questions and concerns faster and more efficiently.

But… There was a little problem, on our back-end help desk, the status you selected wasn’t prominent enough so today we spent a few minutes adding some illustrations to what our support staff will see when you contact us. Here’s a collection of some fun illustrations that will show based on your emotions:

A fun, but practical implementation to improve our customer service and learn more about you. What do you think? Have you contacted us before? Did you feel understood? Leave a comment below to let us know.

We’ve introduced the much requested ability to select furniture collections, mobile friendly presentation pages, video presentations along with some client area overhauls to make the entire virtual staging process faster, easier and more enjoyable.

This update is by far one of the most incredible projects we have worked. Here’s a quick look at some of our new features:

Select Your Furniture

The ability to see our furniture collections and select exactly the furniture that you are looking for is something that we heard many requests for.

We listened to your feedback and took action immediately.

This took us nearly a year to develop because we weren’t willing to just “slap together some furniture” and display it on our website for you to choose from. We don’t think of ourselves as an average company so we didn’t want to give you average furniture collections.

Instead, we worked with world-class designers that hand selected each piece of furniture and accessory to create high-quality room collections that resulted in sophisticated yet livable spaces. We then worked with many of these collections to make sure that they have the highest level of realism once implemented into your photos.

Finally, we gathered months of feedback and test results from our clients and studied buyers and sellers on how well our furniture collections perform in selling property.

The result of all this is what finally created our furniture gallery – a high-quality, professionally designed and tested gallery of our most popular and most effective furniture collections. Choose from any of these collections after uploading your photos. Want our designers to choose for you? We can do that also. We’ll be introducing many more furniture collections as soon as they pass our extensive testing. Stay tuned for updates!

Mobile Friendly Presentation Pages

How you present your property listing matters.After working with many real estate agents and property managers for years we’ve seen the hassles that they go through to email photos to potential buyers and get the right listing information in front of the right people. Have you ever seen those generic links that agents email through the MLS that take you to an ugly page with the tiny photos of the property?

Ugly MLS design vs. Presentation Page

We’re providing a better solution – absolutely free, included with every virtual staging purchase.

We’ve developed a beautifully designed presentation page to display large images of your photos, listing information, a map to the property and we’ve even integrated Google Street View so your clients can explore the neighborhood right from their computer or mobile devices.

Have a look at our demo page here. You can easily share this page with anyone and they’ll have instant access to your photos, property and contact information all on a simple to understand and beautifully designed web page. Here’s something your competition probably isn’t doing. You’re clients will be amazed.

To top it all off, immediately “out-of-the-box” your presentation page will come preloaded with your virtually staged photos and it will be mobile friendly.

This means you can send it to clients and they can view it on their iPhone, iPad or other mobile device. If they are out looking at houses they can view your page on their phone and get GPS directions directly to your listing! Showing a home? Bring an iPad with you to show off your virtually staged photos at the property.

See it in action on the iPad at the video below:

Video Presentations

As an optional add-on you can now turn your photos into a professionally produced video simliar to the one below. This is great for displaying on your presentation page, your own website, sending to clients or even linking to from the MLS.

We’ve seen the incredible effects of video on our own website, it keeps our visitors around longer, engages them and provides an experience that they can’t get anywhere else.

When selling or renting a property we can help you take advantage of this medium. We’ll include specific information about your property in the video and a call to action that will create excitement around your listing and make you stand out from your competition.

More surprises in store

We’ve also overhauled our client area, photo upload and ordering process to make sure your virtually staged photos come out better than ever. We’re still evolving and improving our services everyday… stay tuned for more updates and exciting new advancements in our virtual staging service. Have a suggestion for us? What do you think of our new updates? Leave a comment below.

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 employs a team of highly skilled and trained graphic designers and home stagers, that use a collection of different photo editing and 3D rendering tools. 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 how to use our collection of software to create the highest quality virtual staging.

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 to insert furniture at the correct perspective, an image of the front of a couch 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…

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

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!