Staging: What the Evidence Says

The evidence on staging is weaker than the industry says and stronger than the skeptics say, and the reason is that the two camps are measuring different things. The surveys everyone quotes measure what agents believe. The one controlled experiment measures what buyers will actually pay. They disagree, and the disagreement is the interesting part.

Short version: staging reliably changes how a home is perceived, and there is decent reason to think it shortens time on market. The claim that it adds a specific percentage to your sale price does not survive contact with the research.

Before you spend anything on presentation, it helps to know what the place is worth as it stands. Get a valuation and work from a real number.

Where the familiar numbers come from

The most cited source is the National Association of Realtors and its 2025 Profile of Home Staging. In it, 29 percent of agents said staging produced a one to ten percent increase in the dollar value offered. Twenty percent put the lift at one to five percent, another ten percent put it at six to ten. Forty nine percent of sellers' agents said staging cut time on market. Eighty three percent of buyers' agents said it made it easier for a buyer to picture themselves living there.

Those are real findings from a real survey. They are also, every one of them, agents reporting their impressions of their own work. NAR invited 49,806 agents and got 1,266 usable responses, a 2.5 percent response rate. Think about who answers a staging survey. The agents with a staging story to tell.

This is what economists call selection bias, and it has two layers here. The people who respond are not a random slice of agents, and the homes that get staged are not a random slice of homes. Staged listings skew toward higher price points, better condition, more motivated sellers and, frankly, better agents. Any of those things would produce a higher sale price on its own. When you compare staged sales to unstaged sales in transaction data, you are measuring all of it at once and calling the total "staging."

The experiment that tried to separate them

In 2015 three researchers, Michael Seiler, Vicky Seiler and Mark Lane, published a study in the Journal of Housing Research designed to get around exactly that problem. Their argument was that you cannot untangle vacancy from staging using sales records, so they built an experiment instead. They ran hundreds of prospective buyers through six virtual house tours, varying the staging conditions between groups, and asked what the home was worth.

The valuations did not move. What did move was everything around the valuation. Neutral wall colour and decent furnishings significantly improved how liveable buyers judged the home to be, and their overall opinion of it. The authors' conclusion is worth sitting with: those things are a necessary condition for a purchase, but staging on its own is not enough to produce a higher selling price.

Read those two findings together and a coherent story appears. Staging is not a lever on price. It is a lever on whether a buyer engages with the home at all.

If you are getting a place ready to list, these are the ones to read next:

• Which Improvements Are Actually Worth Doing Before You Sell
• Your Etobicoke Home Did Not Sell: What to Do Next
• Selling and Buying at the Same Time: Which Comes First

Why time on market is where the money actually is

Buying a home is an expensive search. A buyer walks through a dozen places, and each one costs them attention, a Saturday and some emotional energy. Anything that lowers the effort of picturing themselves in your kitchen makes your listing a cheaper stop on that tour. Economists call those search costs. Sellers experience them as showings that do not turn into second visits.

That matters because a listing that lingers gets punished twice. The obvious cost is carrying it: mortgage interest, property tax, utilities, insurance, all running while nothing happens. On a $900,000 Etobicoke house that is real money every month. The less obvious cost is what a long days on market number signals. Buyers read it as evidence that other people looked and passed, and they price that in. This is adverse selection, the same instinct that makes you suspicious of the used car that has been on the lot since spring. So the listing sits, the seller cuts, and the cut invites lowball offers from buyers who now smell blood.

Staging does not add a premium to a well priced home. It reduces the odds that a well priced home goes stale and gets discounted. Those look similar in the sale price column and they are completely different mechanisms.

The counterpoint

The experimental study has its own limits, and they cut against the argument above as much as for it. Participants toured homes virtually and stated a value. Nobody was spending their own money, nobody was competing against another offer, and stated valuations in a research setting are not the same as behaviour in a bidding war. It is entirely possible that staging does move price in a live market in ways a virtual tour cannot capture. One well designed study is not the last word.

There is also segmentation to respect. A vacant condo with an awkward layout is the case where staging does the most work, because there is nothing else for a buyer to anchor on and empty rooms photograph small. A tidy, well kept, lived in family home is the case where it does the least. Treating those two as the same decision is how sellers overspend.

What we would actually do

The way to think about the spend is as insurance against a slow listing rather than as an investment expected to return a multiple. If staging costs a few thousand dollars and takes three weeks off your time on market, it has more than paid for itself in carrying costs and in the price cut you did not have to make. That is a defensible case. "Staging adds five percent" is not.

Whether staging is worth it comes down to your specific property: vacant or occupied, condo or house, and what the comparable listings you are competing with look like this month. Book a call and we will walk your place, tell you which of the five lines above we would actually spend on, and tell you where we think you would be lighting money on fire.

Dave Dubbin
Real Estate Expert
Dave Dubbin & Associates
Real Estate Broker for Etobicoke and Toronto
Sotheby's International Realty, Canada