Last year, when we flipped Cypress, one of the rooms that Mark was most impressed with his handi-work on was the garage.

And who could blame him, really - when these are the before and afters:

Not that it was intended at the time, but we couldn’t help but wonder - if we were to move back in instead of selling, what “room” would this new amazeballs garage be to us?

Would it be a man/woman cave? A cinema? A home office/studio? A teenage retreat? A dedicated Peloton room (!)?

The list of possibilities was endless; as an agent, how do you get buyers to imagine those possibilities without dragging expensive staging furniture in and out and taking a heap of photos?

The answer is to virtually stage it with a few different looks with AI - without the time and expense.

Today’s Tool of the Day

Laksh Moody of virtualstaging.art was kind enough to give me an unpaid trial of this tool, so I thought I’d post about it with the results.

I started my test with a simple room (rather than my garage!) because the angle at which I took the garage photo is probably not ideal for virtual staging.

So here is a pretty bland room I’m going to attempt to stage in a few different ways:

The virtualstaging.art interface is pretty easy to work with. Drop a photo on, choose the room type and click render.

That’s it.

Here are the results:

Living Room

Home Office

Bedroom

Dining Room

I think these images are pretty good, and it’s pretty easy here to visualise one empty room with several scenarios.

And this tool is fast - it takes about 30 seconds to produce each render.

But so far, this assignment has also been simple - it’s a simple room at a simple angle.

Time to up the ante

Despite this garage photo not being at the ideal angle, I decided to see how the AI staging would handle it.

Home Office

This is not too bad apart from the frame and the bookshelf at the back are at slightly odd angles.

I’m not sure about the curtains open over the doors - but I still feel it’s a pretty good attempt for something with zero human intervention.

Living Room

This one looks better - the TV on the door would probably not work there - but I guess one could argue that you could leave that door permanently closed…

I feel like the most challenging room to stage is probably the kitchen - so let’s go there now.

Again, I’ll start with a simple blank canvas:

Original Image (above)

Option 1

Option 2

Option 3

The first image turned out pretty well - but I’ll let you guys spot what’s amiss in the second and third images.

In summary, this genre of AI has a real future in real estate.

Although there are bits and pieces here that are not quite right, I think they won’t be far off!

Happy Hunting 🚀