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.