Does home staging increase the sale price? What the data actually shows

You have an 88 m² apartment in Benalmádena inherited from your mother, empty for fourteen months, with her 1985 furniture still in it. A staging company quotes €3,400 and tells you that «home staging raises the sale price by 6% to 15%». On €285,000 that is €17,000 to €42,000. With those numbers the decision looks obvious.

The problem is that the 6%–15% does not come from any register of completed transactions. It comes from a survey a home staging association ran among home stagers. And the only experimental study published in a peer-reviewed journal concludes the opposite: buyers do not pay more for a tastefully furnished home, even though they like it more.

That does not mean staging is useless. It means it is useful for something other than what is advertised. This article separates what is reasonably documented (less time on market, fewer price reductions) from what is only asserted by the people selling the service (double-digit price increases), prices every format on the Costa del Sol in 2026, and ends with two cases broken down euro by euro: one where staging loses money and one where it makes money.

Worth saying up front: SolProp provides home staging services on the Costa del Sol, so we have an obvious commercial interest in this article concluding «yes». It does not conclude that in every case, and the numbers below explain why. If you are not yet sure what your asking price should be, start with how much your house is worth on the Costa del Sol.

What home staging is, and above all what it is not

Home staging is preparing a property for sale: tidying, depersonalising, lighting it properly and presenting each room so the buyer understands what it is for. It is marketing, not building work. The practical test is simple: if you have to file anything with the town hall when you finish, it was not staging.

That boundary matters because it is where half the inflated quotes creep in. Moving furniture, adding textiles and removing thirty personal objects is staging. Changing the worktop, replacing the shower screen or opening the kitchen into the living room is renovation, with different rules and different numbers. (Our full renovation cost guide, renovating on the Costa del Sol: costs, licences and what adds value, is currently published in Spanish only.)

In between sits a grey area: paint and lighting. Painting an apartment off-white counts as minor works, costs €800–1,600 for 80–90 m², and almost no staging studio includes it in the headline price. Swapping cold bulbs for warm 2,700 K ones costs €60 and improves the photographs more than a new sofa. When you compare quotes, check whether paint is in or out: that is usually the difference between two offers that look €1,000 apart.

It is not a valuation either

A home stager will tell you how your property should look, not what it is worth, and should not try. The asking price comes from comparables, from your area’s absorption rate and from the real condition of the property. The difference between what each professional can sign is explained in appraisal, market valuation and cadastral value: SolProp provides market valuations, not the regulated tasación, which in Spain can only be issued by a valuation company registered with the Bank of Spain.

The five real formats and what each one costs

«Home staging» names five services that differ by an order of magnitude in price. 2026 prices for the Torremolinos–Estepona stretch, VAT included.

Format	What it covers	Cost in an 80–90 m² flat	Per m²	Lead time
Deep clean and depersonalising	Professional cleaning, removal of personal objects and surplus furniture, tidying	€250–600	€3–7/m²	1–2 days
Professional photography only	20–30 images, vertical and colour correction. Video, drone and 360 tours quoted separately	€150–400; €350–700 with video	—	1 day + 48 h
Restyling with what is already there	Rearranging the owner’s furniture, textiles, lighting and plants. Occupied home	€400–1,200	€6–14/m²	1–3 days
Virtual staging	Renders over the real photo, room by room, labelled as a recreation	€15–40/image in a package; €60–200/room bespoke	—	48–72 h
Empty home furnished with rented pieces	Design and styling, transport and assembly, monthly rental, dismantling and collection	€2,600–6,500 for three months	€30–75/m² over three months	1–2 weeks

These are orders of magnitude, not fixed rates: the final price depends on the size, on how many rooms are staged and on whether there is a lift. Translated into real properties on this coast, comparing the minimum package (clean, depersonalise, photograph) with a full three-month staging of an empty home:

• 40 m² studio: €350–800 minimum package; €1,400–3,400 full staging.
• 80 m² two-bedroom flat: €450–1,000 against €2,600–6,500.
• 110 m² three-bedroom flat: €550–1,300 against €3,250–8,000.
• 130 m² penthouse with terrace: €700–1,500 against €3,900–9,600.
• 250 m² villa: €1,200–2,500 against €6,500–15,300.

The line item nobody explains properly

Furniture rental is billed per room per month: €150–400 each. An 80 m² flat with living room, kitchen-diner and two bedrooms staged is €600–1,600 a month, indefinitely, until you complete.

In other words, the €3,400 quote you were shown is the first month’s quote. If the property takes seven months to sell — and the Spanish average in 2026 runs around 80–90 days from listing to completion, with a meaningful share of sales well beyond that — the real invoice can triple. This is why on our own service page furniture rental is quoted separately and paid by the owner: it is not small print, it is the line that decides whether the exercise works.

Ask three things before signing: how many rooms are furnished, what the monthly fee is from month two, and what happens if you sell in three weeks or take a year. A contract with a three-month minimum and one you can cancel freely are very different products even when the headline price matches.

What the evidence actually says

Here is the crux. The figures the industry quotes are not false: they are a different kind of thing from what they appear to be. There is an enormous difference between «29% of agents believe the price went up» and «staged homes sold for 29% more». The first is an opinion datum; the second would be a market datum, and it does not exist.

Source	Year	What it actually is	What it measures	What it cannot show
National Association of Realtors, Profile of Home Staging	2025	Online survey of US agents: 49,806 invited, 1,266 usable responses, 2.5% response rate	What agents believe happened	It does not measure transactions. None of its figures is a price actually paid
Real Estate Staging Association	2021	About 4,600 homes submitted by member staging companies	Days on market self-reported by the firms that sold the service	No comparable control group. The sample selects itself
Asociación Home Staging España	Surveys since 2019	National survey of member home staging professionals	What the people who invoice for the service declare	Self-reported, with no check against transaction records
Lane, Seiler & Seiler, Journal of Housing Research 24(1)	2015	Experiment with hundreds of prospective buyers across six virtual tours, varying wall colour and furniture	Willingness to pay, with a control group	It is an experiment, not the open market. But it is the only design that isolates the variable
Redfin	2019, on 2018 listings	Analysis of real US transactions	Price and days on market, vacant versus occupied	It is correlation: vacant homes are usually inheritances, relocations or urgent sales

The study nobody puts in the brochure

In 2015 Mark Lane, Michael Seiler and Vicky Seiler published the first experimental study of home staging in the Journal of Housing Research. They took hundreds of prospective buyers through six virtual tours of the same property, varying wall colour and furniture across three versions: unfurnished, with ugly furniture and with good furniture.

Participants valued the property at around $204,000 in every version, with no statistically significant difference. What did change was their overall opinion of the house and their sense of future problems: with neutral walls and good furniture, the home looked less troublesome and was better liked.

One detail explains why the opposite belief survives so well. When those same participants were asked what other buyers would do, they said the others would indeed adjust their offers according to presentation. Everyone believes staging works on the neighbour. The authors’ literal conclusion is that staging influences the process but «is not enough to result in a higher selling price».

Where «73% faster» comes from

It is probably the most repeated property statistic of the last decade and it is worth tracing. It comes from the Real Estate Staging Association, the US trade body of staging firms, based on homes submitted by its own members: in its 2021 survey of roughly 4,600 homes, the difference amounts to about nine days.

Nine days is a defensible, credible figure. «73% faster» is the same figure dressed as a percentage of a small base, published by the party that charges for the service and with no constructed comparison group. Both sentences describe the same data and communicate radically different things.

The underlying problem: you cannot isolate the sofa

Even if a flawless study comparing ten thousand staged homes with ten thousand unstaged ones appeared tomorrow, a hard problem would remain. The owner who commissions staging is almost always the same owner who accepts the agent’s recommended price, cleans thoroughly, pays for professional photography and takes the sale seriously. The property sells faster because of that whole package, and attributing it to the furniture is like attributing a patient’s recovery to the colour of the gown.

Our reading, and the reason we still offer the service: within that package, photography and depersonalising have the best cost-to-effect ratio and are also the cheapest. Rented furniture is the most expensive piece and the one with the least evidence behind it.

What is documented: time on market and price cuts

Set the price increases aside and one effect remains across every source, including those that do not sell staging: well-presented homes spend less time on the market and go through fewer price reductions. In the National Association of Realtors’ 2025 report, 30% of sellers’ agents saw slight reductions in selling time and 19% saw significant ones.

The second half of that sentence is rarely told and is the half with financial consequences. A property listed for five months accumulates history: the regular buyers in the area have already seen it, the portals demote it in the results order, and the moment comes to cut the price. Every visible cut signals weakness and drags the negotiation anchor down. The cost of a slow sale is not the time: it is the two 4% price cuts you end up making.

What every extra month on the market costs you

To judge whether shortening the timeline is worth paying for, you have to price the timeline. On a €320,000 flat in Fuengirola, keeping it empty while it sells costs, each month, €40–75 of pro-rated IBI (the annual local property tax every Spanish owner pays to the town hall), €60–180 of comunidad fees (the mandatory service charge for shared areas, pool and lifts), €50–90 of minimum utilities and €20–35 of building insurance: €170–380 of cash out. On a €750,000 villa in Mijas, adding garden and pool upkeep, the range rises to €445–1,040.

To that you add the opportunity cost of the capital tied up, which is a modelling assumption rather than a fact: at 2.5% a year — roughly what a deposit or a twelve-month treasury bill returns without risk — that is €667 a month on the flat and €1,563 on the villa. Adjust it to what you can actually earn, and if you still have a mortgage, add the interest for the period, which is usually the largest item of all.

The operational conclusion: saving four months on the Fuengirola flat is worth €3,300–4,200. That matches the cost of a restyling with professional photography, and matches the cost of a full staging with furniture rented across all those months much less well. Staging does not compete against zero: it competes against its own meter. The costs of the sale itself — agency commission, plusvalía municipal (the town hall’s tax on the increase in land value), energy certificate — are separate and broken down in the cost of selling a property on the Costa del Sol.

Your area’s turnover changes the maths

Shortening the sale is worth far more where there is a lot of competing supply and much less where the property sells itself. Estimated turnover indicators by municipality from our own index, with absorption calculated as transactions divided by supply.

Area	Estimated absorption	Estimated months of stock	Average price
Torremolinos	1.04	11.5	€315,000
Rincón de la Victoria	0.97	12.4	€368,000
Benalmádena	0.97	12.4	€349,000
Fuengirola	0.95	12.6	€321,000
Nerja	0.92	13.0	€394,000
Mijas Costa	0.89	13.4	€440,000
Nueva Andalucía	0.87	13.8	€1,166,000
Mijas	0.83	14.4	€448,000
Estepona	0.82	14.7	€475,000
Marbella	0.80	15.0	€913,000
Manilva	0.79	15.2	€307,000
Málaga City	0.74	16.2	€368,000

These figures come from the SolProp Costa del Sol Price Index (v2026.3, data to June 2026). It is an in-house estimate built from asking prices and our own portfolio, not a record of registered transactions: the full method is in the interactive map’s methodology note and the area data in the Costa del Sol interactive price map. Absorption is an estimated turnover indicator, not an official statistic. The long-form analysis is in where property sells fastest on the Costa del Sol.

The least intuitive reading: Málaga City shows the largest price rise in the sample and the slowest turnover, because the stock is enormous. With sixteen months of estimated inventory, your listing competes against several hundred nearly identical flats and presentation decides which one gets the click. On a Marbella villa with irreplaceable views it matters far less: that buyer is not choosing between forty equivalent options.

Where it pays off and where it is money down the drain

Reduced to essentials, home staging pays off when it corrects a deficit of imagination in the buyer. If the buyer already understands the property unaided, there is no deficit to correct and the spend buys nothing.

Situation	Worth it?	Which format	Why
Empty home with awkwardly shaped rooms	Yes, the clearest case	Rented furniture or virtual	An empty room communicates neither its size nor its use. The only scenario with a market measurement behind it
Inherited home, furniture thirty years old	Yes	Clear-out, paint, restyling, photos	Clearing and painting is cheap and removes the main objection
Occupied, tidy, renovated within five years	Marginal	Photography and depersonalising only	No imagination deficit to correct. Paying for furniture swaps good furniture for other good furniture
Priced 8%–12% above market	No	None: adjust the price	No budget offsets an overprice, and it lengthens the very timeline you wanted to shorten
Off-plan or newly delivered new-build	Virtual or show flat only	Virtual staging	Physically furnishing every unit makes no economic sense
Mid-market flat where comparable stock is deep	Yes, in its cheap version	Clean, depersonalise, photograph	The battle is fought in the portal thumbnail, not on the viewing
Luxury villa with a singular product	Depends, and not on price	Styling and audiovisual production	You are not buying imagination but production quality, read as a signal of seriousness
Property sold as a renovation project	Not physically, yes virtually	Labelled virtual staging	Furnishing what the buyer will strip out is pure cost
Sold with a tenant in place	No	Photography and little else	You control neither the space nor the timings, and the buyer is an investor

Empty versus occupied

This is the distinction that moves the most money and the only one with a transaction measurement behind it. Redfin’s analysis, published in 2019 on homes sold in 2018, found that vacant homes sold for $11,306 less and spent six more days on the market than comparable occupied ones, with city-level differences from 0.9% to 7.2%.

Read it carefully, because it is correlation: a vacant home is usually vacant for a reason — inheritance, relocation, urgency — and all of those push the price down on their own. What the figure does support is that an empty property starts at a disadvantage and that there is something real to correct. If you are selling an inherited property, the tax side matters too: see inheritance tax in Andalusia for foreign owners.

Mid-market versus luxury

In the mid-market, staging is a traffic tool. Your Fuengirola apartment competes with two hundred similar ones and the first decision is made in a 400-pixel thumbnail. The lead photo is almost everything, which is why the format that performs best is the cheapest one in the table.

In luxury the mechanism is different. The buyer of a €1.5 million villa does not need help imagining what the living room is for: what they judge, without saying so, is whether the seller has taken the sale seriously. Poor material in this segment does not make them think the house is worse, but that there is room to negotiate down. That is an effect on negotiation, not on valuation, which is why it does not show up in willingness-to-pay studies.

New-build versus resale

In new-build there is nothing to depersonalise and the buyer assumes the unit is empty, so furnishing unit by unit makes no economic sense: that is what the show flat is for, a staging paid once and amortised across dozens of sales. Renders do work, and are the natural language of a product often sold before it exists. The criteria for buying off-plan are in buying off-plan new-build on the Costa del Sol.

In resale the opposite applies: there is too much personal information in the photos and the work is subtraction, not addition. Removing things is free and has the largest effect. If your budget is €300, spend it on clearing and cleaning, not on decorating.

Case 1, euro by euro: when staging loses money

A 95 m² three-bedroom flat in Fuengirola, renovated in 2022, lived in by its owners, in good condition with decent furniture. Our market valuation puts it at €330,000. Another agency proposes listing at €365,000 «with a premium home staging to hold the price». The owner agrees.

Item	Route A: full staging with furniture, high price	Route B: restyling and photos, market price
Asking price	€365,000	€335,000
Design and styling	−€1,100	−€650
Furniture transport and assembly	−€380	€0
Professional photography	−€320	−€320
Deep clean	−€180	−€180
Months to completion	8	3
Furniture rental at €1,150/month	−€9,200	€0
Cash holding cost at €290/month	−€2,320	−€870
Opportunity cost at €680/month	−€5,440	−€2,040
Price reductions applied	Two, −€34,000 in total	One, −€7,000
Completion price	€331,000	€328,000
Net to the seller	€312,060	€323,940

Difference: €11,880 in favour of the cheap route. And the detail that sums up the whole article: asking €30,000 more at listing translated into €3,000 more at completion. The rest was eaten by five months of meter. What failed was not the staging but using it as a substitute for a price correction — the rented furniture did nothing wrong, it simply spent eight months invoicing while the price scared viewings away.

Commission, plusvalía municipal and capital gains tax are left out because they are nearly identical on both routes. If you are a non-resident, the 3% withholding the buyer must pay to the Spanish tax office on your behalf, and the Modelo 210 return that follows, apply equally in both scenarios: the procedure is in selling a property on the Costa del Sol as a non-resident.

Case 2, euro by euro: when staging makes money

An 88 m² two-bedroom flat in Benalmádena, inherited, empty for fourteen months, 1980s furniture, walls marked where pictures were removed, and photographs taken on a phone on an overcast day. Market valuation: €285,000. The asking price is the same on both routes, to isolate the variable.

Item	Route A: listed as is	Route B: cleared, painted, staged and photographed
Asking price	€295,000	€295,000
Furniture removal and deep clean	€0	−€900
Full repaint in off-white	€0	−€1,250
Design, transport and assembly	€0	−€1,450
Professional photography and video	€0	−€480
Months to completion	11	4
Furniture rental at €980/month	€0	−€3,920
Cash holding cost at €255/month	−€2,805	−€1,020
Opportunity cost at €594/month	−€6,534	−€2,376
Price reductions applied	Two, −€22,000 in total	One, −€7,000
Completion price	€273,000	€288,000
Net to the seller	€263,661	€276,604

Difference: €12,943 in favour of staging, on a total outlay of €8,000. It works here because three conditions stack: the property is empty, it is dated, and it had no decent photographs. Any one of them alone would have produced a much tighter result.

The assumption everything rests on

It is worth showing the seam. Case 2 works because we assumed Route B avoids the second price cut and completes at €288,000 rather than €273,000, and that assumption is precisely the one no source can prove. Remove it — same four months, but completing at €273,000 too — and Route B’s net falls to €261,604, below the €263,661 of doing nothing. In other words: the moment staging stops preventing a price cut, it goes from making €13,000 to losing €2,000.

All of home staging’s return lives in that margin: not in a percentage uplift, but in the probability of not having to cut the price twice. Anyone offering you a guaranteed return on this is selling a certainty the available data does not support.

Virtual staging and where the line sits

Virtual staging — digitally furnishing the photo of an empty room — is the fastest-growing format, for arithmetic reasons: €15–40 per image in a package against thousands for physical furniture, delivered in 48 to 72 hours. On the Costa del Sol, where a large share of buyers decide from another country looking at a portal, it is obviously useful; on buying remotely, see buying property in Spain without travelling. It is also the format most likely to get you into trouble. The rule, short version: a photo cannot show what is not being sold.

What is done to the image	Acceptable?	Condition
Adding furniture and textiles to an empty room	Yes	«Virtual image» label on the photo itself, plus a photo of that room’s real state
Changing wall colour or floor type	Grey area	Only labelled and alongside the current state: you are altering something that is being sold
Digitally removing existing furniture	Yes	Labelled. It hides a taste, not a defect
Erasing damp, a crack, a column or a dropped ceiling	No	None: it is part of what is being bought
Removing the building opposite, a pylon or the road	No	None: views are a recognised price component here
Adding a pool, pergola or terrace that does not exist	No	None, unless clearly identified as a renovation proposal rather than the current state
Stretching the angle until the room is distorted	No	None: a misused wide angle does more damage than an honest render

The legal framework, without overstating it

Spain has no specific rule governing virtual home staging, and none that requires, in those words, that a property render be labelled. What exists is the general advertising and consumer framework, which applies just the same.

• Article 5 of Ley 3/1991 on Unfair Competition treats as deceptive any conduct containing false information, or which — even if literally true — could mislead the recipient about the product’s main characteristics and alter their economic behaviour. A photograph is information.
• Royal Legislative Decree 1/2007, the consolidated Spanish Consumer Protection Act, requires truthful and sufficient pre-contractual information about the characteristics of the property. Directive 2005/29/EC on unfair commercial practices is the European framework both derive from, with the same test: whether the practice distorts the average consumer’s decision.
• Property portals require in their terms that recreated images be identified as such. That is a contractual obligation rather than a legal one, but breaching it has an immediate consequence: the listing is pulled.
• The energy performance certificate rating must appear in the sale listing. It is the most common compliance slip when a listing is rebuilt from scratch after staging.

During 2025 the specialist press reported positions from Spain’s consumer administration along the lines of treating AI retouching of property photographs as problematic. We have not located a published sanction on this specific point, so we leave it as what it is: a direction of travel, not a firm obligation with a fine attached.

Beyond the rules there is a blunter practical argument: the buyer who arrives at the viewing expecting the render and meets reality does not negotiate, they leave. On the Costa del Sol, where many buyers fly in for three days to see six properties, burning a viewing is expensive. If the asset is destined for short-term letting under a tourist licence, the margin for exaggeration is smaller still, because guests rate the gap publicly. The vocabulary in these listings, from wide angle to the nota simple (the Land Registry extract showing ownership and charges), is defined in the property glossary.

How to measure whether staging worked in your case

You will not be able to tell whether staging raised your price, because the version of your property that was not staged does not exist. But you can measure what happens before the offer, which is where staging acts and where signals arrive in weeks.

• Click-through rate on impressions, week by week, from the portal’s statistics panel. This measures exactly what the photographs do. If it does not rise after changing the lead image, the problem is price or location, not presentation.
• Viewings booked per week. Fewer than one a week at a market price almost always points to the price, not the listing.
• Offer-to-viewing ratio. If people come and nobody offers, the mismatch is between what the listing promises and what the buyer finds. It is the classic symptom of staging that overstates.
• Days to the first written offer. The cleanest indicator of how attractive the price-and-product combination really is.
• Offers received against the asking price. Offers consistently 12% below indicate an overprice, not poor presentation.
• Number of price reductions applied. The only one on this list that translates directly into euros. Zero or one is the target.

The one honest experiment you can run

If your property has been listed for several weeks you have something valuable: a baseline. Relaunch the listing with the new photographs and the same price, changing nothing else, and compare the click-through rate of the two previous weeks with the two that follow. It is as close as you will get to a before and after with everything else held constant.

If you change photos and price at once you will learn nothing, and that is why the industry has spent twenty years unable to prove its own headline figure. One technical caveat: some portals give updated listings a temporary boost, so discount the first two or three days.

Seven mistakes that keep repeating

1. Using staging to hold up a wrong price. The expensive mistake, the one in case 1, and the most common. No presentation work offsets a 10% overprice; it only delays the moment you admit it.
2. Treating furniture rental as a one-off payment. It is a monthly fee that runs until you complete. Before signing, calculate the cost over six months, not one.
3. Paying for the staging and economising on the photography. That is exactly backwards. The photo is seen by 100% of interested buyers; the furniture only by those who already decided to view.
4. Decorating to the owner’s taste. The goal is not that you like the house: it is that nobody dislikes it. Anything with strong personality subtracts buyers.
5. Furnishing rooms nobody looks at and neglecting the one that decides. Living room, kitchen and main bedroom hold the attention; the third bedroom and the storage room decide nothing.
6. Using virtual staging to hide defects. Beyond the legal risk it backfires: the buyer who feels misled at the viewing does not negotiate down, they disappear.
7. Measuring nothing. Without a baseline of clicks and viewings before the work, you will not know whether it worked, and you will commission it again next year on the same faith.

The order we would spend it in

If you had to spend in order and stop when the budget runs out: first set the price using real comparables, which is free and determines everything else. Then clear and clean (€250–600). Then fix what shows in the photo and is cheap: warm bulbs at the same colour temperature throughout, the bathroom sealant, the blind that will not close. Then decide whether to paint (€800–1,600, only if the walls are marked or in strong colours). Then commission professional photography (€150–400), the one item we would recommend in every scenario in the table without exception. And only then, if the property is empty, compare the three- and six-month cost of rented furniture against a labelled virtual staging package: the virtual option often wins.

Frequently asked questions

How much does home staging increase the sale price?

No transaction measurement supports a figure. The 6% to 25% uplifts in circulation come from surveys run by home staging associations among their own members. The more neutral National Association of Realtors reports that 29% of agents believe staging raised offers by 1%–10%. The only published experiment with a control group found no difference in willingness to pay.

How much does home staging cost on the Costa del Sol?

It depends on the format. In an 80–90 m² flat: deep clean and depersonalising €250–600; professional photography €150–400; restyling with the owner’s furniture €400–1,200; virtual staging €15–40 per image in a package; empty home with rented furniture €2,600–6,500 for three months. As a global benchmark the sector works to 0.5%–2% of the property’s value.

Is it true that staged homes sell 73% faster?

The figure exists, but it originates in a Real Estate Staging Association survey of homes submitted by its own member firms, with no properly constructed comparison group. In its 2021 edition, across roughly 4,600 homes, the difference amounts to about nine days. Nine days is reasonable; 73% is the same number presented as favourably as possible by the party that charges.

Is home staging the same as renovating?

No. The boundary is administrative: if the work needs a declaration or a licence from the town hall, it is building work. Staging moves, removes, lights and decorates; renovation changes services, surfaces or layout. Paint sits in between: it counts as minor works, costs €800–1,600 for 80–90 m², and you should check whether the quote includes it.

Is staging worth it if my flat is occupied and in good condition?

In its expensive version, almost never. An occupied, tidy, recently renovated home already communicates its use and its size, which is the problem staging solves. What does pay off is the cheap part: depersonalise, remove objects and pay for professional photography. Swapping good furniture for other rented good furniture has no demonstrable return.

What does virtual staging cost and is it legal in Spain?

Between €15 and €40 per image in a package, and €60 to €200 per room for bespoke work. It is legal as long as it does not mislead: there is no rule specific to virtual staging, but article 5 of Ley 3/1991 on Unfair Competition applies. Digitally furnishing an empty room and labelling it is fine; erasing defects or adding what does not exist is not.

Do I have to state in the listing that photos are recreations?

Yes, and it is best done on the image itself rather than only in the text, because photos travel separately across social media and search. Portals also require it in their terms of use. What we recommend is publishing, next to every render, the photo of that room’s real state: it removes the legal risk and avoids burning viewings.

Does home staging work on luxury properties?

Yes, but for a different reason. The buyer of a villa over a million does not need help imagining the living room: they assess production quality as a signal of how seriously the seller is treating the sale. Poor material invites a lower offer. That is an effect on negotiation rather than valuation, so the spend is justified on photography and video before furniture.

Does staging make sense for new-build?

Physically, unit by unit, no: that is what the show flat is for, a staging paid once and amortised across many sales. Virtually, yes, and it is its natural territory, because much new-build is marketed before it exists. The buyer already knows the unit is empty, so a recreation misleads nobody as long as it is identified.

How do I know whether staging worked in my case?

By measuring what happens before the offer: click-through rate on impressions, viewings booked per week, days to the first offer and the number of price reductions. The clean experiment is to relaunch the listing with new photos at the same price and compare the two preceding weeks with the two that follow. Change photos and price together and you learn nothing.

Keep reading

• The cost of selling a property on the Costa del Sol
• How much is my house worth on the Costa del Sol?
• Where property sells fastest on the Costa del Sol
• What €300,000 buys today in each Costa del Sol municipality
• Buying property in Spain as a foreigner
• Taxes on buying property in Andalusia

Sources and methodology

The figures on perceived effect come from the National Association of Realtors’ Profile of Home Staging 2025: an online survey sent in February 2025 to a random sample of 49,806 US agents, with 1,266 usable responses and a 2.5% response rate. It is an opinion survey of agents, not a measurement of transactions, and it refers to the United States market.

The same applies, with a more direct conflict of interest, to the Real Estate Staging Association and the Asociación Home Staging España: these are surveys run by trade bodies of home stagers among their own members, on projects those members carried out, with no control group and no check against registry data. That is why they are cited here as industry statements rather than measurements.

The experimental study is Lane, M. A., Seiler, M. J. and Seiler, V. L., «The Impact of Staging Conditions on Residential Real Estate Demand», Journal of Housing Research, vol. 24, no. 1 (2015), pp. 21–36: it measures stated willingness to pay under controlled conditions, with the external-validity limits that implies. The vacant-versus-occupied data comes from the analysis Redfin published in 2019 on homes listed and sold in 2018 in the United States; it is a measurement of real transactions, but correlational: it does not separate the effect of being empty from the circumstances that usually leave a property empty.

Prices by format are orders of magnitude including VAT for 2026 on the Torremolinos–Estepona stretch, built from rates published by Spanish home staging and property photography studios and by sector quote comparators, with an upward premium for transport and storage on the coast. They are not fixed rates and do not replace a quotation. None of them are SolProp’s own rates.

The turnover indicators by area come from the SolProp Costa del Sol Price Index (v2026.3, data to June 2026). It is an in-house estimate built from asking prices and our own portfolio, not a record of registered transactions, and it should not be compared directly with figures from the INE, the Land Registrars’ Association or the Cadastre, which are different sources of a different nature. Absorption is calculated as transactions divided by supply and is an estimated turnover indicator. Full method in the interactive map’s methodology note.

The two euro-by-euro cases are constructed examples based on real local prices, property types and costs, not the accounts of two specific transactions. The opportunity cost of capital is modelled at 2.5% a year as an explicit assumption, and the time-to-sale figures on each route are assumptions of the example rather than observed results: the section «The assumption everything rests on» shows how the result reverses when they change.

The legal framework cited is Ley 3/1991 on Unfair Competition (article 5, deceptive acts), Royal Legislative Decree 1/2007 approving the consolidated text of the Spanish Consumer Protection Act, and Directive 2005/29/EC on unfair commercial practices. There is no rule specific to virtual home staging in Spain as at the date of this article. SolProp provides home staging services, a conflict of interest we have chosen to declare explicitly in the body of the article.

This article is general information and does not replace advice from a lawyer or property adviser for your specific case. Last updated: August 2026.