What to do with an empty flat before it goes on the market

An empty flat should be the easy listing. Nothing to tidy, no seller's furniture to work around, no negotiating about the dog. In practice empty properties sit on the market longer, and the reason is not taste.

A buyer walking into an empty room has no way to judge its size. There is nothing of known dimension to compare against, so a nine square metre bedroom and a twelve square metre bedroom look identical, and both look smaller than they are. Furniture is a measuring stick, and an empty room has removed it.

That is before the photographs, where the problem compounds.

An hour of preparation, in order

Open every curtain and blind, then turn the lights on anyway. Daylight alone leaves the corners dark, and a dark corner in an empty room reads as damp. Both together is what makes the room look cared for.

Sweep. Empty floors show everything, and a floor is most of the frame in an empty room. Dust and builder's debris are the two things that make a clean flat photograph as a neglected one.

Deal with the marks the furniture left. Wall scuffs where a headboard sat, picture hooks, a patch of unfaded paint where a wardrobe stood. These are invisible when the room is furnished and glaring when it is not. A tub of filler and forty minutes covers most of it.

Check what the previous tenant left in cupboards. Buyers open cupboards. They also appear in photographs if the door is ajar.

Put the bin out of shot. There is always a bin.

Photographing an empty room

Empty rooms are harder to photograph well than furnished ones, and the same things that help a small room help here: stand just off a corner rather than in the doorway, keep the camera level rather than tilting up to catch the ceiling, and include the floor. Floor is what a buyer reads as space.

Photograph every room even if it is empty and unremarkable. A listing that shows eight rooms and skips the ninth invites the buyer to assume the worst about the ninth.

Where staging fits

Virtual staging exists for this case specifically. It puts the measuring stick back: a bed of known size in a bedroom, seating in a lounge, a table in a dining room, so the buyer can read the proportions rather than guess at them.

What it does not do is change the property. The walls, the floor, the windows and the light are the ones you photographed. That distinction is not a technicality, it is what keeps the listing honest when the buyer arrives at the viewing and finds the room exactly as the photograph implied, minus furniture that was never claimed to be included. Every staged image we return is marked as a digitally edited photograph for that reason, and our disclosure policy sets out exactly what does and does not change.

Bedrooms, lounges, dining rooms, studies, entrance halls and covered patios are the spaces that benefit, because those are the ones a buyer has to picture themselves using. Kitchens and bathrooms are already fitted, so they get enhanced rather than furnished.

The short version

• Empty rooms photograph small because there is nothing to judge scale against
• Lights on as well as curtains open
• Sweep, then fix the marks the furniture left behind
• Photograph every room, including the dull ones
• Staging puts the scale reference back without changing the property