Do you have to disclose virtual staging?

Yes. Every market that has ruled on it requires a digitally altered listing photograph to say so, and the ones that have not ruled explicitly still reach the same place through general misrepresentation law. Treat disclosure as the default and the question becomes an easy one: where does the label go, not whether.

The practical rule most boards converge on: a reasonable buyer must not be able to form a false belief about the property from the photograph. That is a test about the buyer, not about the edit — which is why the same tool can produce an image that needs a label and one that does not.

The distinction that decides it is whether the edit changed the property or the contents of the property.

• Furniture added to an empty room — disclose. The room is real, the sofa is not.
• Clutter removed from a lived-in room — disclose. Buyers judge storage from what they see.
• A wall repainted, a floor replaced, a kitchen refitted — disclose, and be specific. These read as the current condition of the house.
• A roof replaced, a facade refinished, a garden replanted — disclose. Exterior condition is a survey question.
• Exposure, white balance and lens correction — generally not, provided nothing about the property changed. This is what a photographer has always done in the darkroom.

The line is not about how much the pixels moved. It is about whether a buyer standing in the room would find the photograph had told them something untrue.

On the image, not only in the description. A photograph travels — portals syndicate it, buyers screenshot it, agents paste it into a brochure — and the caption almost never travels with it. A label burned into the frame survives all of that.

• On the image itself, legible at thumbnail size. "Virtually staged" is enough; "digitally enhanced" is vaguer than the rule wants.
• In the listing description as well, naming which photographs were altered.
• Keep the original. If the edit is ever questioned, the unedited frame is the whole answer, and it is the one piece of evidence nobody can reconstruct later.

Vizydesign keeps every original alongside its result and watermarks shared links by default — see the disclosure policy for what the product does and does not do for you.

Removing something is as disclosable as adding something, and it is the edit people forget. A photograph with the neighbour’s extension edited out, or the pylon taken off the skyline, has changed the property’s setting — which is exactly the kind of thing a buyer relies on a listing photograph to show honestly.