Imagine for a moment that you are buying your first home, the biggest purchase of your life.

You walk into an open house and you see a pristine mid-century modern living room, the beautiful

leather couch, the set of Eames armchairs, the brass bar cart stocked

with crystal glasses. In the kitchen, there's a bowl of perfect lemons. In the backyard,

a crocheted hammock waffes in the breeze. This is it, you say. This is the life I want.

You have been sold on a dream, carefully curated by a home stager.

There's some sort of weird animosity towards stagers, like how we're basically faking homes.

We are really trying to help buyers

to imagine, okay, how can I move in here and then really maximize my return on investment.

For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett.

Today, home staging. Fifty years ago,

people showing their homes to prospective buyers didn't do much more than tidy them up. That

changed with a Seattle realtor named Barb Schwarz. She saw an empty home as an opportunity to set a scene, to sell a potential buyer on a

vision. Shores registered a trademark on the term stage in a real estate context and advertised

her services to home sellers in Washington, but it wasn't until 30 years later that staging really took off.

Before online listings existed, there wasn't really a need to stage a home so much.

That's Karen Prince. She's an experienced home stager and the author of a book called Secrets of

home staging. You would just go to your realtor and you'd say, here's what I'm looking for and my price

range, and then they would take you to homes and you had no idea what you were going to be

seeing.

With the introduction of online listings, buyers could browse through photos of dozens of houses

in their area before deciding whether or not to go to an open house.

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