Is staging worth it when selling a house?

What staging actually does

Staging furnishes a house for sale: furniture, rugs, art, lamps and linen brought in for the campaign and taken away at the end of it. It gives each room a scale reference, so a buyer can see that a bed fits and a dining table works, and it gives the photographer something to shoot.

It does not change the house. The floorplan, the sun, the street, the title and the condition are what the buyer is actually buying, and they are what a building inspector and a lawyer will be looking at.

What the decision depends on

• Whether the house is empty. Empty rooms photograph flat and read smaller than they are, and buyers find it hard to judge what will fit. This is the case where staging is doing the most work.
• Whether your furniture suits the house. Oversized, worn or crowded furniture makes rooms look smaller and dates them. Furniture that fits the house does the job already.
• Who the likely buyer is. A first home, a family home and a do up attract different people. A buyer looking for a renovation project is buying the bones and the site, and dressing the rooms speaks past them.
• Cost against the rest of the campaign. Staging is a marketing cost, charged separately from the agency fee, and it competes with photography, video, portal listings and print. What it costs depends on the number of rooms, the length of the hire and the company.
• Whether you are living there. Full staging usually means moving most of your things out and living around it, or moving out altogether.

The cheaper version

Partial staging fills only the rooms that need it and leaves the rest. Decluttering does much of the same job for nothing: clear benchtops, empty half the wardrobe, take down personal photographs, remove one piece of furniture from every room, and clean to a standard nobody keeps up day to day.

How to decide

Look at the listing photographs of homes near you that have recently sold, then photograph your own rooms on a phone and compare. If the rooms read empty, dark or cluttered, staging is solving a real problem. If they already read well, the money may do more on photography, on where the listing appears, or on a repair an inspector would otherwise write down.

Get a written quote, for the rooms you actually want done, and agree the spend in writing before the campaign starts.