The democratization of home staging services, traditionally reserved for ultra-luxury properties, is reshaping how homes across price points go to market, according to Guest House CEO Alex Ryden, who sees technology as the key to expanding access.
“Staging has been a service that has grown in popularity tremendously over the last couple decades,” Ryden says. “It started in more premium cities like New York, San Francisco, where really high dollar listings commanded well positioning.” But he notes a significant shift: “It’s actually moved from 15-20-50 million listings down to million dollar homes, or even $750,000 homes.”
This expansion, according to Ryden, is driven by clear market performance data. “Because of the ROI that agents everywhere are seeing when you stage a home full stop, it’s going to sell for more. It’s going to sell faster compared to a vacant listing,” he says.
Traditional staging’s growth has been constrained by logistics and timing challenges. “Traditionally, staging, as it was growing in popularity, not only was expensive, but it took a tremendous amount of time. It would take sometimes months to get a great staging dialed,” Ryden says.
His company’s tech platform aims to solve this by automating much of the process. “We’ve shrunk that down to a few days,” he says, noting that this speed is particularly crucial “in a very unpredictable market where an agent might win a listing this morning and then want to get to market by this weekend.”
The shift toward tech-enabled staging is gaining institutional support. “The National Association of Realtors recently invested in our business because they see us as such a critical tool to the agent stack,” Ryden says. “They want to continue to support us and bring us into more associations, more MLS organizations, more brokerages.”
Ryden sees staging evolving into what he describes as “almost a public utility” for real estate. “We want to democratize it so much that any agent can access staging,” he says, suggesting that streamlined, tech-enabled services could help standardize professional presentation across the market.
