I belong to and sporadically participate in a Facebook group for (mostly) local Realtors, and the topic of home staging comes up fairly often, and whether it’s worth what it costs. For the uninitiated, what I’m referring to is the interior design that goes into preparing a home for sale, to make it as marketable as possible. There are a few different ways to skin this cat: having a staging company take over and bring in their own furniture and decor ($$$), having a staging company give guidance on what to do with your own furniture and decor ($$), do virtual staging ($), or DIY (free!). The question that usually comes up, generally when selling a completely vacant house, is whether to go for the full physical staging experience, go virtual, or go au naturel.
Cost is typically the biggest factor– to stage the most important rooms (living areas, dining room, master bedroom, maybe an office) can run anywhere from a couple thousand bucks to a bunch more thousands of bucks, depending on which company gets the golden ticket and what kind of home you’re trying to sell. Virtual staging– which is using software to fake-furnish rooms for the pictures– has a wide range of cost as well, but last time I checked it’s around $40 a photo for actual, not AI slop staging. So, for an average house at an average price, let’s just say that physical staging is $2500 and virtual would be $200. Why not, close enough.
Both physical staging and virtual staging make for good photos, which is step one in getting buyers interested in the house. The difference, though, goes to the human touch. Physical staging involves an actual human designer who makes an actual visit to the house to decide what to load in the truck and where to put it all when they come back with their crew. An example:
Here’s the living room of a house built in 1984, in which the stagers decided to work around the accent wall in the back. Warm, but in a benign way! Inviting! Vaguely mid-century! It’s not rocket science, but it gives the room some character and gives buyers a visualization of what they can do with the space.
What happens though if the home was only virtually staged? Here’s a living room with fake furniture in it:
Looks nice enough but I at least get some uncanny valley effect from it. Everything looks sort of plopped down. Aside from that though, the obvious problem is obvious. Once you walk into the house, it’s going to look like this:
There’s nothing wrong with an empty house, but marketing works best when the product over-delivers on the pitch. The virtually staged photos might get buyers interested enough to see the house, but when they show up they’re not getting an improved experience, and that’s how houses sell. Think of it like online dating– you’re going to have a better time if the real-life person at least looks like their photos.
As much as we all like to think otherwise, most of us don’t have much imagination. It’s a special skill to walk into a completely empty room and picture it furnished and decorated perfectly. Virtual staging goes part of the way there, by making the photos look decent. Physical staging is for the A-Z experience since buyers will also see it in the house. I believe, in most cases, it’s worth the money.
I have no research to back up my opinion and people who say they do tend to be citing anecdata. The National Association of Realtors does a survey of real estate agents to see what they think, and guess what! Real estate agents think it works, to the tune of a 1-10% increase in sale price. The observations cited in the survey aren’t exactly the kind of hardcore peer-reviewed data that should be treated as gospel, but I think there’s some validity. To me, it’s common sense for vacant homes. Staging enhances the marketing, at a cost that might be around half a percent or less of the price of the home. It isn’t difficult to make that money back through a higher price or a shorter time on market. If you’re selling a house you want buyers to feel warm and fuzzy when they get there. It’s as simple as that.
