When Wendy and I sold our condo and bought a house we got to see a lot of staging. In Toronto over the past 20 years staging has gone from a thing a few people do to being the standard. I have complaints about how staging works and what things it promotes (classism! rabble rabble) but the tricky thing about staging is that it isn't easily defined and it gradually slides from completely reasonable to icky without a clear dividing line.
I will admit at the outset that we staged our condo to sell it, so while I will complain about staging and its effects, I couldn't turn it down personally. I know that the staging process made me money, so despite how destructive it is, I wasn't willing to toss away tens of thousands of dollars on principle... especially when our real estate agent included staging for free.
At the beginning you just have cleanup. You want to sell your house? Clear that old junk off the porch, mop the floor, pick up the laundry. I can't see any reason to complain about that. You want someone looking through the place to be able to see what they are getting and feel comfortable. The trouble is you keep on doing things that seem reasonable and eventually your place has been repainted neutral white, is filled with expensive furniture, decorated with fancy art, and completely unusable because all of your tools and gear have vanished. It is sterile, boring... and looks like the place a rich person might live. The kind of person who has taste in fine art, pays other people to do the work for them, and thinks garish colours are SO last year.
That is the part of the process that grinds my gears. The stagers tried to tell us that we had to repaint everything so that the prospective buyers could see themselves living in our space, but I think that is nonsense. We weren't trying to let them see themselves... we were trying to trick their brains into thinking of our condo as a rich person's residence.
The buyer wants to be rich, and they love the vision of themselves as a rich person, so we designed our place to facilitate that dream. We put up ugly, shapeless modern art because that is how people in our economic bracket think a rich person's home looks. I am sure that if you are selling a higher end home the staging process changes; you want to make the house look like a person that has twice that much money lives there. The ideal staging makes the person who is looking to buy that place feel like it is better than the price would suggest, but not too much better, or it triggers cognitive dissonance.
Wastefulness bothers me. I hate that we had beautiful colourful walls and we had to paint them all white. I hate that we had to install laminate flooring because that is what is expected at this price point, even if plenty of buyers aren't particularly interested in laminate floors. So much of staging is doing work that will immediately be undone just to shove money one direction or another. I like doing things to improve a building - I hate doing them solely as a trick.
The trouble is we are all trapped in a destructive cycle of game theory. We are playing prisoner's dilemma, except that we only play it with any given opponent once, so everybody defects all of the time. Nobody has an incentive to cooperate, and the real estate people have every incentive to get people to spend more to raise the selling price because they are paid a percentage.
Even though I can see how this ends up screwing everybody over (except the real estate agents....) I don't see a good way out of it. People are emotional and foolish and as long as they desperately want to increase their social status and houses are expensive then staging and other trickery will take place. People want to be rich and powerful and a person's home displays that status clearly. While these things hold, we are going to continue to try to make our homes look like an Important Person lives there, and we are going to continue to waste our collective resources to achieve that.
