Virtual Home Staging - Another great way to mislead home buyers!

As a Sarasota buyer agent, it is frustrating enough to arrive for a showing only to find the listing agent has misrepresented the property in the MLS photos, beyond just the usual "putting the best foot forward". A true representation of what the home actually looks like would be nice, but this is often not the case.

Now comes a new way a misrepresenting the same old house, Virtual Home Staging. This is not a critique of home staging in general, which is often an effective way to highlight a homes' qualities, and is fairly common in the Sarasota real estate market.

Virtual home staging is basically adding features and objects by applying photo enhancements and other forms of graphic arts software to manipulate reality. For example, the room sizes could be made to looks larger, landscaping could be added or a room could be made to look freshly painted, even when it has wall paper from the 1970's.

The end result of the showing? An agents time wasted and a buyer disappointed by the misrepresentation. Real estate agents need to polish our professions' image, not tarnish it with smoke and mirrors.