Technology Is Proliferating In Home Sales. Does It Work?

Source: San Francisco Chronicle, Kathleen Pender
Photo: Photographer Danny Osterweil uses a drone to take pictures of a house for sale in Sausalito. Virtual staging and tours inside and out are increasing, making it easier than ever for armchair house hunting. (John Storey, Special to the Chronicle)

It’s getting easier to go house hunting without leaving your house.

Real estate agents are using new, and some not so new, technologies that let potential buyers go through, above and around homes and rooms from their computer or mobile device, sometimes in ways they couldn’t in real life.

While some are designed to give potential buyers an enhanced, but accurate view of a home, what you see is not always what you get. Those beautiful pictures seemingly taken at twilight that are so popular in real estate ads may be real, or may have been shot on a rainy day and digitally enhanced with “virtual twilight.”

Real estate agents on a budget might use “virtual staging” to impose digital furniture and accessories in a photograph, rather than hauling in real furniture, bedspreads and bowls of lemons. Depending on where the ads appear, it may or may not be obvious that the furniture is fake.

Taking virtual staging a step further, Sotheby’s International Realty offers its agents an app that uses augmented reality to let clients hold up a mobile device and see digital pictures of furnishings in a real-life house. It’s similar to the way Pokémon Go players see virtual creatures in the real world through their phones.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Technology-is-proliferating-in-home-sales-Does