AGENTS SAY STAGING HELPS. ONE LARGE DATASET AGREES. NEITHER IS A PROMISE ABOUT YOUR HOUSE.

NAR's 2025 Profile of Home Staging invited a random sample of 49,806 active Realtors in February 2025 and received 1,266 usable responses, a 2.5 percent response rate, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.75 percent at the 95 percent confidence level (VERIFIED). Twenty-one percent of sellers' agents reported staging all their listings, down from 38 percent in 2017; 29 percent said staging led to a 1 to 10 percent increase in the dollar value offered; 49 percent said it reduced time on market (VERIFIED).

A working paper released in late 2025 analyzed 15,777 home transactions using hand collected listing photographs and a machine learning model that detects furniture, and reported that staged homes sold for roughly 10 percent more and about one week faster than comparable unfurnished homes; the authors also ran a pre-registered online experiment to test causality (PROBABLE). It is an unpublished working paper, and it was read through a secondary summary because the paper's own page could not be opened, so it is labelled accordingly.

The question is not staging yes or no; it is what the photographs will show. An empty house photographs small and cold; a house with dated furniture photographs old; a clean, edited, lived in house often photographs well without a stager. Price the staging quote against the listing calendar and the likely price band, and against the cheaper edits: paint, light, and removing half the furniture.