A photographer or a third party lays furniture over your listing photo. The furniture is not in the room. The overlay is there to give the image depth, show the size of the space, and suggest how the room could be laid out.

Currently you may pay somewhere around $20 to $60 a photo through an Australian service, so a set of listing images usually lands between $100 and $300 for the property.

That is why most sellers look at it first, and there is nothing wrong with asking the question.

A tenanted property. If a family is renting your home, they are not the ones selling it, and there is nothing in it for them in having the place emptied out around their kids, their animals and their jobs. An overlay gives that listing depth and scale without displacing anyone.

Some tenants have good furniture and will work with the agent to present the home well. Where they can’t, or where they’d rather not, virtual staging is the sensible option and we will say so.

This is not the same as a home you are living in yourself. We style those regularly, working around your furniture and your life, and that is a different product with a different price. The tenanted case is specific: the person in the house has no stake in the sale.

The problem is the gap between the photo and the property. Three moves show up over and over:

• Rooms stretched so the space reads larger than it is.
• Furniture placed dead centre to open up floor area that isn’t really there.
• The photo cut off where the room ends, so you can’t see where the space actually stops and it reads bigger than it is.

It goes further than furniture. One listing recently had an external shot with a larger deck, mature trees, pendant lighting, potted plants and a finished lawn. None of it was at the property.

Now think about what that does to a buyer. They have filtered for four bedrooms, two living areas, two car spaces, 600 square metres. Your home came back in that filter alongside forty others. They picked yours, gave up their Saturday morning, drove out on the promise of an outdoor space to have their coffee in, and found a bare slab.

The relationship starts on the back foot, and that ground is hard to make up in the ten minutes they spend in your home.

Virtual staging is usually $100 to $300 for a set of listing photos. Physical staging with us starts at $3,900 for a vacant home and $4,100 where the owners are still living in it, GST inclusive.

That is a real gap and budget has to dictate some decisions. What is worth being clear about is what the higher number buys, and it is not furniture. It is a marketable product: a home presented so that more of the right buyers put it on their Saturday list, walk in, and find it better than the photos suggested rather than worse.

Worth saying plainly, because we would rather you spent the money well than spent it with us.

Styling does not generate offers by itself. It won’t fix marks on the walls, and it won’t stand in for a proper bond clean. It sits on top of the declutter, some landscaping, and photos taken properly rather than on a phone. Then the home goes to market on the websites and out to the agent’s database.

The exposure and the marketable product work together. Take one out and the other one carries a load it was never built for.

An overlay changes how a room looks. It cannot change what your home is advertised as having.

That second thing is where physical staging does its real work. A stylist walks through and looks at marketability, not decoration:

• A dining room nobody uses becomes a second living area, and the listing goes from four bedrooms one living to four bedrooms two living.
• A sixth bedroom becomes a study, and a six-bedroom house is advertised as five bedrooms, a study and three living areas.

Those sound like small changes. They are not. They change which filters your home comes back in and which buyers are looking at it, and more people through the door on Saturday is the whole point of the exercise.

An overlay cannot do any of it, because the furniture only exists in the photo.

Virtual staging is the right answer for a home you cannot physically present. For a vacant home, the question is whether you want a photo that promises something, or a home that delivers it.

If you are still deciding, a stylist can walk through and tell you what your home would actually need.