In this in-depth guide we will be reviewing BoxBrownie and take a look at the services they offer, their quality and pricing and the most relevant competitors to compare it to.
About BoxBrownie
BoxBrownie is probably one of the most well known if not the most well known company in the real estate virtual staging and photo editing space. The Australian company was started back in 2014 by Mel Myers and Brad Filliponi and was one of the first companies to offer virtual staging at a larger scale and popularized virtual staging around the world. In 2018 BoxBrownie became a part of NAR’s inaugural REACH cohort, their startup accelerator program to help new companies market to REALTORs. In recent years they had a booth at almost every major real estate conference in the US and they have enterprise partnerships with many larger brokerages.
You can find out more about BoxBrownie on their website or YouTube channel:
Services, Pricing & Quality
Nowadays BoxBrownie describes itself as the online hub for all things digital and offers a wealth of services beyond real estate photo editing. Below we’ll take a look at the different services they offer for real estate clients and compare their pricing and quality with competitors.
Virtual Staging
BoxBrownie first became known for its decent quality, low-price virtual staging service and the back then fast turnaround time of only 48h. They offer virtual staging for one flat price of $24 per photo and offer unlimited free revisions within the first two months. There is no bulk discount if you order a larger volume. Unlike many other virtual staging companies they don’t offer a rush delivery service so in the worst case you actually have to wait 48 hours for the result even though we received our test images back in just 14 hours.
BoxBrownie offers 10 different furniture styles to choose from so for most western markets there should be more than enough options. They also offer one of the largest selections of room types in the market so you can let the designer know very precisely what you want in the room.
Virtual Staging Review ordered three example images for virtual staging from BoxBrownie and other virtual staging services and here you can see the staged results from BoxBrownie:
You can find our full comparison of the best virtual staging companies here. In our test BoxBrownie was still one of the top companies even though other companies like Stuccco or Virtual Staging Solutions had higher quality results and AI services like Virtual Staging AI offer a service that is faster and cheaper by orders of magnitude.
As you can see, Stuccco’s images look a tad more realistic and on top their images come with a 24 hours turnaround time and the option to book a 12 hours rush delivery.
If you aren’t selling luxury properties you should consider trying out Virtual Staging AI first before placing an order with BoxBrownie. They offer a free trial where you get the actual results with a watermark and you only need to commit if you like the results to get the images without their watermark. Their virtual staging takes only about 10 seconds and costs just $1 per photo.
Virtual renovation
With virtual staging the input room stays untouched and the designers just add furniture. Virtual renovation on the other hand also includes changes to the structure of the input room like repainting the walls, replacing the flooring or removing a wall. Here the goal is to show the buyer what the property could look like after a renovation. With virtual renovations it’s even more important than with virtual staging that buyers are in the know and aware of the fact that the property doesn’t look like this in real life yet.
BoxBrownie offers virtual renovations starting at $24 per image even though it could get more expensive depending on how demanding the edits are. In order for the designer to be able to understand what changes are requested you need to supply design inspirations and drawings or descriptions of how they should be applied to the input image.
Item removal
We all know properties that could need a little cleaning and decluttering. If you can’t do this in real life then virtual item removal or decluttering could be a good option. BoxBrownie offers virtual item removal for $4 to $8 depending on the scope of the edits. You just need to upload the original image and a description of what you would like to be removed.
One thing to keep in mind with virtual decluttering is that depending on how large the items are that should be removed the designer can’t know what’s actually behind them and needs to make an educated guess. This often leads to missing power outlets in the wall behind an old sofa or similar issues.
The results of virtual decluttering or item removal from BoxBrownie are pretty similar to what the industry standard is. Similar to virtual staging some AI companies have started offering virtual item removal in a few seconds. For example Virtual Staging AI or Apply Design both offer complimentary item removal with their virtual staging services.
Image enhancement
BoxBrownie offers a fairly comprehensive image enhancement service for only $1.6 per photo. It’s worth to note that besides the general image enhancements like brightness & contrast adjustments it also includes more advanced image edits like replacing the sky with a beautiful blue sky or replacing brown grass with green gras.
BoxBrownie is one of the cheapest services for this type of image enhancement. Other virtual staging companies like VRX staging charge as much as $10 per photo for just replacing the sky and grass. This type of image edit is also offered by some of the AI real estate image editing companies, sometimes even as a complimentary service.
Day to dusk
Some properties can benefit a lot from being presented in the evening at dusk. In order for the photographer to not have to come twice you can use BoxBrownie’s day to dusk service to change the daytime to dusk digitally.
BoxBrownie charges $4 per photo for this service and the guaranteed turnaround time is 24h. BoxBrownie’s results for this time of edit look highly realistic even though this can be said about almost all companies that offer this service.
Floor plan redraw
If you have a manually drawn floor plan or a simple 2D black and white floor plan of a property and would like to woo buyers in with a highly quality floor plan you should consider using BoxBrownie’s floor plan redraw service.
The service starts at $24 for a hand drawn sketch to 2d black and white conversion and prices go all the way up to $32 for 3d full color floor plan. BoxBrownie’s services are pretty average in this segment in terms of quality and pricing.
If you don’t have a floor plan yet we highly recommend you take a look at CubiCasa. They offer a smartphone app which enables you to get a floor plan by simply walking through the property with your smartphone camera pointing to the ground in front of you. Their floor plans start at $9.99 for a 2d black and white floor plan and keep in mind this doesn’t require you to already have a hand drawn sketch. CubiCasa even claims a 99% accuracy for their floor plans.
Online Reviews about BoxBrownie
BoxBrownie has an average rating of 2.4 based on 10 reviews on Trustpilot. While this might seem bad they have over 600 reviews on Google with a 4.9 star rating solidifying BoxBrownie’s status as one of the most established virtual staging and real estate image editing companies.
One thing quite a few customers are interested in is the growing role of AI in the industry and how technology makes the services BoxBrownie offers orders of magnitudes faster and cheaper. Read what BoxBrownie has to say about it:
BoxBrownie Customer Support Options
BoxBrownie offers 24/7 customer support via chat, email and phone and they offer free phone consultations and webinars to introduce new customers to their platform. Overall we’ve only heard good things about their customer service. In comparison to other services they don’t offer a money back guarantee though so once you commit you can’t get out anymore.
Advantages of BoxBrownie
- Broad range of services like virtual staging, virtual renovation, image enhancement and floor plan redraws
- Reasonably priced
- Reasonably fast
- Excellent customer support
- High brand recognition
Disadvantages of BoxBrownie
- 10x more expensive than AI competitors
- Not the most realistic results compared to competitors
Best BoxBrownie alternatives
Based on the service you’re looking for and your budget we have a few recommendations for the best BoxBrownie competitors:
Stucco: Higher quality results than BoxBrownie and only slightly more expensive
Virtual Staging AI: 10x faster and cheaper than BoxBrownie
Styldod: Same results for slightly less money
