Should You Stage Your Home Before Selling? What 1,266 Agents and Two Studies Found

Quick answer: staging rarely raises your price on its own, but it helps your home sell faster and gets far more attention online. In NAR’s 2025 survey, 49% of listing agents said staging shortened time on market. Only 29% saw higher offers, of 1% to 10%. For most Miami luxury homes, the smart move is to stage three rooms, not the whole house.

If you’re about to list a home in Miami, someone has probably told you to stage it. Someone else has probably told you it’s a waste of money. Both have a point, and the research shows exactly where the line is.

Thinking about selling? Book a free pre-listing walkthrough and we’ll tell you what to stage, what to skip, and what your home is worth today.
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What the agents say

The National Association of Realtors surveyed 1,266 Realtors for its 2025 Profile of Home Staging. Nearly half of listing agents, 49%, said staging reduced time on market, and 19% called the drop significant. The price story is weaker. 29% of agents said staging raised offers by 1% to 10%. That means most agents saw no price change at all. These are also agents’ impressions, not measured sale prices.

What the studies say

When researchers test staging under controlled conditions, the effect on price mostly disappears.  Professors from William & Mary, Johns Hopkins and Old Dominion took hundreds of buyers through virtual tours of the same homes with different furniture and paint. Published in the Journal of Housing Research, the study found that staging changed buyers’ first impressions but not what they were willing to pay. A 2023 experiment in the Journal of Real Estate Practice and Education compared furnished and empty photos of the same apartment. Value estimates barely moved. But people spent significantly longer looking at the furnished photos. That last finding is the one that matters.

Before and After Staging

Before and After Staging Pictures of our record breaking Sales in Ponce David. Read more about the playbook behind this sale at $2,545 per Square Foot.

Why attention is the real payoff

Staging doesn’t make buyers pay more. It makes them stop scrolling. In Miami’s luxury market, that’s where the sale is won or lost. Most buyers see your home on a phone first, and many are relocating from another state or another country. They build a short list online, then fly in to see a handful of homes. If your photos don’t earn a place on that list, the quality of the house in person doesn’t matter.

Here’s the math on a $3 million home. Professional staging typically runs about $1,500 for a standard home, according to NAR, and more for a large luxury property. Every extra month on the market costs you taxes, insurance and maintenance, and listings that sit tend to end in price cuts. If staging gets you a few weeks faster and even a 1% better offer, that’s $30,000. The cost is small and the upside is real.

The three-room rule

You don’t need to stage every room. NAR asked buyers’ agents which rooms matter most:

The living room is usually the first photo a buyer sees. The primary suite is where they picture their life. The kitchen is the room they judge hardest. Put your budget there, and keep everything else clean and simple.

Should you stage? Find your situation

Vacant homes are where staging pays off most. In a 6,000-square-foot home, buyers can’t judge scale from an empty room, and space that should feel generous comes across as bare.

How we put staged photos to work

A beautifully staged home only helps if the right buyers see it. This is where we’re different. With more than $4 billion in career sales and over 20 years in Miami real estate, the Siddons Group has built one of the largest buyer audiences in the market. Your staged photos and video go out to 1.3 million monthly YouTube viewers, a database of more than 78,000 buyers and sellers, and a retargeting audience of more than 950,000 people who have already shown interest in Miami property. We also track how buyers respond.

Find out what your home needs before you list

Every home is different. A 30-minute walkthrough will tell you which rooms to stage, what to skip, and how your home compares to what’s selling right now in your neighborhood. There’s no cost and no obligation.

Book your free pre-listing walkthrough, or call David Siddons directly at 305.508.0899 or email [email protected].

Sources: National Association of Realtors, 2025 Profile of Home Staging (survey of 1,266 Realtors). Seiler, Seiler & Lane, “The Impact of Staging Conditions on Residential Real Estate Demand,” Journal of Housing Research. Furnished vs. unfurnished photo experiment, Journal of Real Estate Practice and Education, 2023.