Do you hate marketing an empty house? Virtual Staging AI offers a quick and easy-to-use solution to stage the rooms of a home virtually and save you and your client hassle. Craig Rowe offers a review of the service.
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Virtual Staging AI is software for staging images of vacant rooms.
Platforms: Browser
Ideal for: Agents, teams, brokerages, new home builders
Top selling points:
- Fast turnaround of finished images
- Free, multiple revisions
- Open API for deeper integration
- Multiple room designs
- Minimal user interaction
Top concern
Essentially, avoiding feature bloat. This is a worthwhile app, a tool specific to its need, but to scale, it’ll need to add features quickly, but do so carefully without negating what makes it so useful.
What you should know
The company’s name says it all. Using artificial intelligence, the app quickly populates a picture of an empty room with virtual furnishings.
The user needs only upload a high-quality image and choose the room type from a drop-down list, such as bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, living room and so on. Images are rendered as you wait and can be redone if the first iteration isn’t what you’re looking for. The style defaults to mid-century modern, but new interior design themes are being added as this goes to press.
The idea here isn’t new, as Roomy, BoxBrownie, and a number of others have worked in this space for years. But Virtual Staging AI (VSAI) combines purpose-driven usability without any upsell. It’s ideal for the single agent challenged by a market that’s keeping homes on the market longer, and for builders facing the same challenges — especially smaller custom contractors.
The user interface and experience never pull attention away from the software’s core competency, as there’s not much else it needs to do.
That said, there’s room for growth, and I can see opportunities for new features that’ll support what it was designed to do. I asked about exterior staging and was told it’s in the works, as are new room designs once more training data is input.
Users should feel comfortable working with VSAI’s, as its image history feature resembles Dropbox, or a Google Drive interface, leveraging a common grid layout and menu commands on a horizontal navigation up high, and the user is presented with before and afters.
I noticed a couple of results images with skewed perspectives, likely due to the AI needing a few times to get it right. I’m OK with this, as it’s an easily-repaired bug and will likely resolve itself as the software evolves.
Aspiring users need only to create an account through their browser, choose an account level and drop in their images. (Agents can try out the product for free, but images will be watermarked.) The costs are super reasonable, ranging monthly from $29 to an enterprise plan at $299, which will come with API access.
The app is the product of a few students at Harvard working in the university’s Innovation Labs. I should note this is the second college-based proptech startup I’ve seen in as many months.
So, is VSAI as good BoxBrownie? As of now, no. Can it compete? For sure — and it has in-app delivery in under a minute. Give it time and the right need, and this app will make selling vacant homes a lot easier.
I’ll also add that this app was built by a team that likely, on average, isn’t able to buy alcohol legally. So the future is bright if they choose to stick around proptech.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
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