I came back to Washington this weekend to help my wife prepare for putting our house on the market. Per the instructions of the Realtor, we are working on "staging" it.
I wonder how much this really matters. Once one gets beyond structural and neighborhood characteristics, does "staging" matter to the ultimate sale price? One would need to collect data on sold houses (including some index of how well presented they were) and then run a hedonic regression that included the presentation index in order to find out.
Paul Carrillo at GW has a nice working paper where he finds that houses that are marketed on line with pictures get better outcomes than those that don't. But the pictures could just reflect the fact that Realtors are more likely to present pictures of houses that are better looking (and therefore more valuable) in the first place.
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