A friend of mine listed a two-bedroom apartment in Marrickville last month. Vacant possession. Bare white walls, scratched timber floors, the kitchen looking tired under fluorescent light. Not exactly the lifestyle shot that stops a buyer mid-scroll on realestate.com.au.

She spent $350 on virtual staging. Three rooms, delivered in 48 hours. The listing photos showed a stylishly furnished apartment with warm lighting and carefully placed artwork. The property sold in nine days — well under the Inner West average for that price bracket.

Virtual staging has been around for a few years, but what’s changed recently is the quality, the speed, and the data backing up its impact on days on market. Let me walk through what I’m seeing.

The Numbers Are Hard to Argue With

I’ve been tracking days on market across agencies I work with, comparing virtually staged listings against unstaged ones in similar suburbs and price points. The sample isn’t huge — about 120 listings over the past six months — but the pattern is consistent.

Virtually staged properties are averaging 22% fewer days on market compared to unstaged equivalent listings. That gap narrows in hot markets where everything sells quickly, and widens in softer conditions where buyers have more choices.

The effect is most pronounced for:

• Vacant properties: Empty rooms photograph poorly. Virtual staging transforms them.
• Investment properties: Tenanted properties with dated furniture benefit from showing potential rather than current reality.
• Off-the-plan and new builds: Display suite quality without the display suite cost.

Domain’s research has consistently shown that listings with higher-quality imagery receive more enquiries. Virtual staging is essentially an image quality upgrade at a fraction of the physical staging cost.

The Cost Comparison

Physical staging in Sydney typically runs $3,000-$8,000 for a standard three-bedroom house. Premium homes in the Eastern Suburbs can cost $15,000 or more. That’s a significant VPA line item that vendors often push back on.

Virtual staging costs between $30 and $150 per room. A full property can be done for $200-$500 with 24-72 hour turnaround.

That’s an order of magnitude difference. More importantly, the lower cost removes vendor objections. When you’re asking a vendor to approve $300 instead of $5,000, the conversation is entirely different.

The Quality Has Jumped

Early virtual staging looked fake. Furniture floated above floors. Shadows went wrong directions. Scale was off — couches that would never fit through the doorway.

The current generation has largely solved these problems. AI-powered tools read room dimensions from photos, match lighting direction, and apply realistic shadow mapping. A trained eye can still sometimes spot it, particularly in wide-angle shots. But for the vast majority of buyers scrolling through REA Group’s listings on their phone, the images look natural.

Here’s the Catch

And it’s a meaningful one. Buyer expectations.

When a buyer falls in love with a virtually staged apartment online, then walks into an empty space with scuffed walls and a stain on the carpet, the disconnect is jarring. That emotional gap — between what they imagined and what they see — can kill a deal faster than any pricing issue.

I’ve spoken with buyer agents who say this is becoming a genuine friction point. Buyers feel misled. Some feel outright deceived. And in a market where trust between agents and buyers is already fragile, that’s a real problem.

The solution isn’t to stop virtual staging — the benefits are too clear. The solution is transparency.

Best practices I’d recommend:

1. Label virtually staged photos clearly. A small watermark or caption reading “Virtually staged image” on each affected photo. Several providers now include this automatically.

2. Include unstaged photos too. Show the property as it actually is alongside the staged version. Let buyers see both the potential and the current reality.

3. Brief your open home team. Make sure whoever is running inspections knows the listing was virtually staged and can address buyer questions directly. “Yes, the furniture in the photos was digitally added to help you visualise the space. Here’s how the room measures up.”

4. Don’t stage over problems. Virtual staging should add furniture and decor, not hide defects. Staging over a crack in the wall, a water stain on the ceiling, or a damaged floor crosses a line. That’s not staging — that’s concealment.

A Note on Strata Listings

For apartment listings, virtual staging has a strata angle worth mentioning. Common areas — lobbies, pools, rooftop terraces — are increasingly being virtually staged too. My advice: only virtually stage the private dwelling. Leave common areas as photographed. If the building’s common areas aren’t attractive enough to photograph, that’s information the buyer deserves to have before committing to a strata scheme.

Where This Goes Next

The next wave of virtual staging is interactive — buyers will be able to swap furniture styles, change wall colours, and visualise renovation possibilities within the listing itself. For a nervous first-home buyer trying to see past dated decor in a Petersham terrace, that’s powerful.

For now, though, the basics matter most. Use virtual staging. Be transparent about it. Track the impact on your days on market. The data says it works. The ethics say we need to do it honestly. Both things can be true at once.