Home › Guides

Guide

Virtual staging for rental listings: a property manager's guide

An empty apartment photographs as a box with a floor. Renters scrolling a listing site decide in seconds, and bare rooms make it hard to judge scale or picture a layout. Virtual staging adds furniture to the photos of a vacant unit so the listing reads like a home, without moving anything in. This guide covers when it is worth it for rentals, how to shoot the unit, how to disclose it, and what it costs.

Which rental units benefit most

• Vacant units between tenants. The photos are taken while the unit is empty anyway, so staging the best two or three shots adds little time.
• Awkward layouts. Open plans, long narrow living rooms and odd-shaped bedrooms are where renters struggle most to picture furniture. A staged photo answers "does a sofa and a dining table both fit here?"
• Higher-rent and furnished-style listings. Where a unit competes with newer buildings that have model units, staged photos close part of that gap.
• Units listed before turnover is finished. If the unit is clean and painted but not yet shown in person, staged photos let you start advertising from day one.

Small studios and units that will be shown in person within a day or two benefit less. Spend on the units that sit on the market longest.

Which photos to stage

You rarely need every room. For most rentals, stage two or three photos:

1. The main living area. This is usually the lead photo and the one that decides the click.
2. The main bedroom. Renters want to see that a queen or king bed fits with room to walk around it.
3. An open-plan dining or work corner, if the unit has one. Showing a desk or a table makes the space useful, not just big.

Leave kitchens and bathrooms as they are. They are already full of fixtures, and staging them adds little.

How to photograph the unit

• Shoot from a corner at chest height, showing two walls and plenty of floor.
• Turn on all lights and open the blinds. Even, bright light gives the best result.
• Remove cleaning supplies, ladders and leftover items before you shoot. Anything left in the room either stays in the staged photo or limits where furniture can go.
• Use the widest lens setting on a phone, but don't use extreme wide-angle modes that bend the walls.

Disclosure for rental listings

Renters are entitled to know the unit comes unfurnished. Fair housing and consumer-protection rules generally prohibit misleading advertising, and many listing sites have their own photo rules. A simple approach:

1. Put a "Virtually staged" label on each staged image, readable at thumbnail size.
2. Say "Unfurnished. Some photos virtually staged." in the listing description.
3. Post the original empty photo next to each staged one.
4. Never change the unit itself: walls, flooring, fixtures, appliances, windows and views stay exactly as the camera saw them.

This is general information, not legal advice. Check the rules of the listing sites you use and your local requirements.

What it costs per unit

Physical staging rarely makes sense for a rental: furniture rental, delivery and removal cost more than a month's turnover delay for most units. Virtual staging at StagedPixel is $9 a photo, or $59 for 8 photos ($7.38 each), with 3 style options per room returned within 24 hours. Staging the usual three photos of a unit costs about $27. Every image comes labelled "Virtually staged".

More guides

• Virtual staging MLS disclosure
• Photographing vacant listings
• Virtual staging cost
• Which rooms to stage first
• Virtual vs physical staging
• Photographing rooms for staging