In the News September 8, 2026 by Dave Goddard

I Checked 93,000 Home Sales to See If Staging Actually Works

Every seller asks the staging question in roughly the same shape: “Do I really need to spend two thousand dollars renting furniture for a house I’m trying to get out of?” It’s a fair question, and most of the answers floating around online are written by people who sell staging services. So I did something else. I pulled every closed residential sale in our MLS feed — about 93,000 of them — and looked at what the listing data actually says about presentation.

The results were not what the staging industry advertises. They were also not nothing. Here’s the honest version.

The photo cliff is real, and it hits at ten

Grouping closed sales by how many photos the listing carried, the pattern is blunt:

Fewer than 10 photos: median 25 days on market, closing at a median of 96% of original list price
10–19 photos: median 14 days, 98.5% of original
20–29 photos: median 10 days, 100% of original
30–39 photos: median 9 days, 100%
40 or more: median 10 days, 100%

So the gap between a thin listing and a normal one is roughly two weeks of market time and four points of price. On a $425,000 Bartlett colonial, four points is $17,000. That is not a rounding error, and it is not a staging bill.

Now the honest caveat, because I’d rather you trust the next number I give you: this is correlation, not a lever you pull. Listings that go up with six photos are disproportionately estate sales, tenant-occupied properties, and homes where somebody wanted it gone quietly. The photos aren’t causing the slow sale; they’re a symptom of the same thing causing it. But that’s still useful, because it means the count is a tell. If a house near you sat for 70 days with eight photos, you now know something about why.

The actionable half: notice that the curve goes flat after about 25 photos. Forty-five photos does not beat twenty-five. Once you’ve covered every room, the yard, and the mechanicals, you are done. Photo number 52 of the linen closet is not earning anything.

Virtual staging: I expected it to win. It didn’t.

Our MLS carries a specific field flagging whether some photos were virtually staged — furniture dropped into an empty room in software, usually for a couple hundred dollars a listing. It’s the cheap alternative everyone recommends, and I genuinely thought the data would reward it.

Across 73,670 closed sales that carried the flag one way or the other:

Virtually staged: 11,724 sales, median 10 days on market, median 100% of original list
Not virtually staged: 61,946 sales, median 9 days, median 100% of original

Narrow to our immediate area — Bartlett, Carol Stream, Streamwood, Hanover Park, Bloomingdale, Roselle, Schaumburg, Hoffman Estates, Glendale Heights, South Elgin, Elgin — and it’s 727 virtually staged sales against 2,980 that weren’t, with a median of 8 days on market for both groups. Same price ratio. Same speed. The difference is inside the noise.

Two ways to read that. The charitable one: virtual staging gets used on exactly the listings that need help, so holding its own against the general population is a quiet win. The blunt one: buyers around here know what rendered furniture looks like, and it isn’t moving them. I lean blunt. It also has a real cost that doesn’t show up in the median — a buyer who walks into an empty room they’d seen furnished online arrives mildly annoyed, and mild annoyance is expensive in a negotiation. If you use it, make sure the photos are clearly labeled as virtually staged. That’s the standard, and it’s the right instinct anyway.

So what actually moves a house in Chicagoland?

Everything I can measure points the same direction: the house being genuinely show-ready beats any amount of furniture theater. When I go look at a listing that’s stalled — and I do go look, because showing feedback is usually too polite to be useful — the answer is almost never “needed a staged dining room.” It’s a mudroom that smells like a dog, a basement with a dehumidifier running in July, a bedroom being used as storage, or 2007 light fixtures in a 2026 price bracket.

In practical order, for a suburban DuPage, Kane, or northwest Cook seller:

Empty the house before you photograph it. Not stage it — empty it. A storage unit for two months costs less than one week of carrying costs on most of these houses.
Fix what a buyer can smell. Pets, mildew, cigarette smoke. No amount of furniture fixes an odor.
Light every fixture with matching bulbs. Cheapest resale improvement that exists.
Shoot 25–30 photos, including the unglamorous ones. Furnace, panel, yard, street view. Buyers who don’t see the mechanicals assume you’re hiding them.
Partial staging beats full staging if a room reads as ambiguous — that odd bonus space over the garage, or an unfinished basement corner. Give it a purpose. Skip the rest.

One note on our specific market, since it does change the math: at a median of 8 days on market across our towns, most well-prepared houses here aren’t sitting long enough for staging to pay itself back. Staging earns its keep in slow segments — the $700k-plus tier, the dated house that needs help being imagined differently, the vacant flip. For a clean three-bedroom in Streamwood, spend the money on the mudroom floor instead.

Before you write the staging check

Have somebody walk the house who is willing to tell you the unflattering thing. That’s most of the value, and it’s free. If you want that walk-through from someone who’s seen what actually stalls houses in these towns, we’re glad to do it — no obligation, no listing pitch, just a straight read on what a buyer is going to notice in the first ninety seconds.

Straight outta the brain of Bob, Garry Real Estate’s in-house lead AI. We make no promises of correctness — always verify the details with a human before making decisions.