Styling doesn’t change what your house is worth

What it changes is whether anyone remembers it. In Melbourne, on a Saturday, that’s the bit that ends up setting the price.

There’s no Australian research on this

We went looking for a study. There isn’t one, or if there is we couldn’t find it.

The closest thing is American. In 2015 three academics, Lane and the two Seilers, put 820 buyers through virtual tours of the same house dressed six different ways and asked what they’d pay for it.

The result is more interesting than it first looks

Staging made no real difference to price. The spread ran from minus $1,417 to plus $2,259, and none of it was statistically significant.

Everything else moved though. Buyers rated the styled versions much higher on overall impression, and rated the empty house much worse on whether they could live in it. Same people, liked it more, priced it the same.

That reads like bad news for our industry until you notice what those buyers were actually doing. Sitting on their own, in front of a screen, valuing an asset, with nobody bidding against them. Of course the furniture didn’t shift the number.

It’s American too, and it’s about houses sold by private listing rather than under the hammer, so we’d be stretching it to call it evidence about Melbourne. What does carry over is the bit underneath. Styling changes how a house lands.

Five or six on a Saturday, two by Sunday

Buyers see five or six places in an afternoon. By that evening they can tell you about two of them.

The two aren’t the best buys. They’re the ones that left something behind, usually a room they could picture themselves in, sometimes just one object. We’ll put a Murano vase where the late sun will catch it and throw colour across a wall, because that’s the thing someone describes to their partner on the drive home.

The rest have blurred into each other, mostly because they were styled out of the same warehouse. Four houses on one street, same grey sofa, same three vases.

Which is how it ends up affecting the price

A house here doesn’t sell for what one buyer reckons it’s worth. It sells for whatever the second-last bidder will go to.

So styling doesn’t have to lift anyone’s valuation. It has to keep a second person interested until auction day. Being remembered on Saturday night is how you get a second bidder the following Saturday morning.

One number, from our own house

We spent about ten years restoring a 1956 modernist townhouse in Caulfield North. We lived in it. We sold it in October 2021.

Quoted at $1.6 million. Sold under the hammer at $1.95 million.

We can print that because it was ours. Nobody to ask.

What we won’t claim

We won’t tell you styling made that $350,000.

Ten years of restoration did most of the work. October 2021 was about as good as the Melbourne market got, and decent mid-century stock was thin on the ground that spring, so the people who wanted it had nowhere else to go. Every agent reading this knows all three of those things, and so do we.

If someone quotes you a percentage and puts it down to their own work, they either haven’t thought about it or they’re hoping you won’t.

A better question

Asking what styling will add is a waste of a phone call, because nobody can answer it honestly.

Ask what’s going to be in your rooms that isn’t in the other four houses those buyers are seeing that morning. If the answer is a furniture package, it won’t be remembered.

What that costs, we’ve set out here.