How to Market a Vacant Home

Houston Real Estate Podcast with Dale Ross

We're seeing a lot of vacant homes for sale in our market since things have slowed down. Is it OK to showcase your home on the market with photos of it without furniture, though?

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In our market, homes are selling a little bit slower, causing many homes to go vacant before they sell. For this reason, I recently had a customer ask whether a home that's for sale will show better furnished or unfurnished.

The most important thing is that the photographs used to showcase your home are taken while the home is furnished. Whenever your home is displayed online with photos, if it doesn't show furniture, it doesn't show scale.

If you look on the MLS, you'll see a lot of listings that don't have professionally-shot photos. The listing agent will go in and take a picture of an empty room, and really, all you see is the corner of an empty room. Sometimes, even when homes are furnished, you'll still get bad photos if you don't use a professional photographer.

Furniture in your photos will help show scale.

In our case, we want rooms to be furnished when the pictures are taken for scale, but also for the sales brochures that we produce for each home.

Another step that I personally take (that I don't think most agents do yet) is virtual staging. If you've already moved out of your home, I have the photographs staged virtually with furniture that will show the scale of the room, even though there's not actually furniture in the room. This allows the home to show better online and in our sales brochures.

Showing a home in-person without furniture is not a big deal, but taking photos of a home without furniture is a big deal.

If you have any questions about staging or photographing a home, give me a call or send me an email. I'd be happy to help you out.