Feels like home: how home stagers construct spatial rhetorics to persuade homebuyers

ABSTRACT

Bringing together research from consumption, materiality, and economic sociology, I explain how real estate stagers attempt to construct persuasive spaces. I conceptualize real estate staging as a judgment device that influences economic decision-making in a market of singularities. Using data from the content analysis of nearly 200 staging documents, as well as from interviews and observations with real estate stagers, I describe how stagers mobilize the material environment of houses to construct persuasive spatial rhetorics, and offer prospective homebuyers oriented knowledge about the quality of houses. Specifically, I examine how stagers convey a home’s livability to buyers by using material objects to influence their senses, imaginations, and processes of evaluation. In so doing, I highlight the role of materiality and embodied experience in home selling, and reveal how home staging constructs the context of the most consequential consumption decision most people ever make.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural sociology
• materiality
• housing
• economic singularities
• spatial rhetorics

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the insightful comments Terence McDonnell and Mary Ellen Konieczny offered on previous drafts, and for the input of both faculty and student participants in the Culture Workshop at the University of Notre Dame. I am also grateful for the exceptionally constructive comments of three anonymous reviewers and the editor of this journal that were instrumental in the development of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use the terms “real estate stager” and “home stager” throughout, in addition to the simplified “stager.” The first term helpfully emphasizes stagers’ close ties to the real estate profession, and the second highlights the multidimensional meaning of “home” that stagers target with their spatial rhetorics. Both associations are relevant, and the different terms are not meant to signify different groups of staging professionals.

2 Notably, Karpik does not categorize the home as a singularity, and his passing reference to housing characterizes a home’s multidimensionality as divisible to its constituent parts, each of which can be rationally evaluated, rather than as the structural multidimensionality of singularities (2010, 25–26). He is referring here to the possibility of calculating the numeric value of specific features of houses, both in market terms, and in relation to buyers’ preferences. It is true that different features of homes can be priced according to their contribution to the home’s overall value (for example, as represented by Remodeling Magazine’s annual “Cost vs. Value Report”); and researchers have also identified specific housing features that increase inhabitants’ satisfaction with the home (James 2008). However, this characterization of a house’s value as a simple aggregate of its objective features misses the substantial role that emotion, taste, and context play in determining how buyers evaluate homes, and what price they will pay for a home (Besbris 2016; Christie, Smith, and Munro 2008; Munro and Smith 2008).

3 Colloquially, the terms realtor, real estate agent, and real estate broker are often used interchangeably. Anyone with a real estate license is an agent, but, technically, only agents who are members of the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) may be classified as Realtors. As such, I generally use the terms “agent” and “real estate agent” in this paper. I use “realtor” only when referring to agents explicitly linked to NAR.

4 Eight of the contributors/authors in these documents have published books in the fields of staging, marketing, and real estate, further demonstrating their relevance to the field beyond these documents.

5 The term “livability” is used in real estate research as an indicator of a buyer’s desire to live in a particular house (e.g. Lane, Seiler, and Seiler 2015). While the concept of livability I develop here includes desirability, it also includes perceptions of belonging or congruence, and of relative value. Additionally, I emphasize livability not as a discrete reported degree of desire, but as an embodied experience buyers have within the material environment of a house.

6 As noted above, most descriptions of staging’s efficacy are based on the reports of agents and stagers, rather than on empirical tests or observations. Some experimental research suggests that buyers are capable of separating their attraction to a house from its market value, and that they will not pay more for staged houses (Lane, Seiler, and Seiler 2015). However, this same study suggests that a staged home might sell more quickly (even if not for a higher price) (Lane, Seiler, and Seiler 2015), and there is also evidence that vacant homes take longer to sell (Turnbull and Zahirovic-Herbert 2011). The precise mechanism driving that difference has not been determined, but stagers have filled this gap with anecdotal and common sense knowledge about buyers. Whether or not stagers are correct, their beliefs about buyers’ cognitive deficits strongly shape their spatial strategies, which then enter the housing exchange as a judgment device.

7 I am treating stagers as functionally separate from real estate agents here. Many agents also act as stagers, in which case they would advise the seller on the home price.

8 From 1924 to 1950, which includes the U.S. housing boom following World War II, part of the association’s code of ethics included a commitment to “never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … members of any race or nationality … whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood” (Helper 1969; quoted in Massey and Denton 1993, 37). Before and during this period, real estate brokers actively promoted and adopted “whites only” neighborhood covenants, until such were outlawed in the 1948 Shelley v Kraemer Supreme Court decision (Massey and Denton 1993). The Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968 and prohibits racial discrimination in housing; nonetheless, there is substantial evidence that Black Americans, in particular, continued to face unequal treatment in the housing market in the subsequent decades (Massey and Denton 1993; Pearce 1979; Galster 1990a, 1990b; Wienk et al. 1979; Yinger 1991; Turner, Edwards, and Mikelsons 1991; Galster and Godfrey 2005). Rather than overt and official discrimination, unequal treatment often took the form of racial “steering,” where clients of different races were directed to different neighborhoods (e.g. Galster 1990b; Galster and Godfrey 2005), and given different kinds and amounts of information about housing options (Massey and Denton 1993).

9 Note that since this is the model home of a homebuilder, it offers oriented knowledge to buyers not only about this home, but about all the homes this builder constructs.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, University of Notre Dame [Grant Number American Dream Summer Grant].

Notes on contributors

Kelcie L. Vercel

Kelcie Vercel is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in the United States. Her research focuses on the intersections of materiality, consumption, family life, and the self.