Agents and sellers are beginning to use virtual staging technology to decide which physical improvements to make before a home hits the market – a use case that changes the tool’s function from presentation to capital allocation.
Raffi Holzer, Co-Founder & CEO of Palazzo, says this shift is one he anticipated. Brokerages are asking for a visually grounded presentation tool that helps sellers decide where to spend money before listing. Tools like Palazzo’s render specific improvements – a fresh exterior paint color, an updated kitchen – onto photos of the existing home, giving agents a visual basis for recommending one investment over another.
Instinct vs. Market Reality
Sellers preparing to list a home face improvement decisions with limited objective guidance. A listing agent may recommend repainting, updating fixtures, or refreshing the exterior based on experience. But the seller has no visual framework for evaluating those recommendations, and the agent has no standardized way to present the case for one improvement over another.
Holzer sees virtual staging technology filling that gap. “There is virtual staging that helps the buyer actually commit, which is a big part of what people are using it for,” Holzer says. “And then there is virtual staging to help the seller make the renovations in real life.”
According to Holzer, the requests he’s fielding make the use case concrete: agents want to show a seller a rendered version of their home with specific improvements applied and use that visualization as the basis for deciding where to spend. The question being asked is not “what does this home look like staged?” but “which of these changes will most affect what this home sells for?”
From Marketing to Decision-Making
Currently, staging is almost exclusively a post-preparation marketing activity – something done after renovation decisions have already been made, to present the finished product to buyers. Moving staging into the decision-making phase before improvements are undertaken changes its function entirely.
“Can you help me analyze this home to identify where we’ll get most bang for our buck in terms of repainting the home, sprucing up the exterior – what is going to help this home sell best?” Holzer says, describing the requests coming in from agents. “And can you put together a presentation for me to share with the seller?”
For sellers who are skeptical of improvement costs or uncertain about which changes matter to buyers, a rendered comparison – here is the home as it is, here is the home with these specific changes applied – may be more persuasive than verbal recommendations alone. The agent arrives at the pre-listing conversation with visual evidence rather than intuition.
The pre-listing preparation phase has historically been loosely structured and highly subjective. If visualization tools can generate credible before-and-after comparisons tied to actual furniture and finish costs, the conversation between agent and seller about where to invest becomes grounded in something more specific than experience alone.
Price Coherence Builds Trust
One technical prerequisite for this use case is ensuring that the products shown in a visualization are financially coherent with the property being staged. Luxury sellers and mass-market sellers have different budgets for improvement, and a staging tool that pairs high-end finishes with budget fixtures undermines the credibility of the recommendation.
“You don’t want the $15,000 couch being matched with the $250 rug,” Holzer says.
Applied to pre-listing renovation recommendations, this means the visualizations shown to a seller should reflect improvement options that are financially appropriate for the property’s likely buyer profile – not aspirational renderings that bear no relationship to what the seller can afford or what the market will reward.
Where Technology Falls Short
This pre-listing advisory use case is still early, and current tools face a structural limitation: coverage is uneven across room types. Kitchens and bathrooms – often where improvement spending has the biggest impact on sale price – are harder to render convincingly than bedrooms or living spaces, a gap Holzer attributes simply to product coverage still catching up.
“We don’t have the same offerings in closets and kitchens and bathrooms as we do in bedrooms and home offices and patios,” Holzer says. “So we need to continue to expand our offering.”
That gap matters for pre-listing diagnostics specifically. A tool that can confidently recommend paint and staging changes in a living room but can’t yet model a kitchen renovation is offering a partial picture of where a seller’s money would go furthest.
For sellers weighing whether to invest in physical improvements before listing, the ability to see rendered alternatives first – matched to realistic budgets and actual products – turns an intuitive decision into a visual one. These tools don’t replace the agent’s judgment about what the market rewards, but they can give the agent and seller a shared visual reference point that verbal advice alone often can’t.
About the Expert: Raffi Holzer is Co-Founder and CEO of Palazzo, a virtual staging platform that renders real, purchasable furniture into listing photos from a single 2D image.
This article is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or investment advice. The views and opinions expressed herein reflect those of the individuals quoted and do not represent an endorsement of any company, product, or service mentioned. Readers should conduct their own due diligence and consult qualified professionals before making any investment decisions.
