Feels like home: how home stagers construct spatial rhetorics to persuade homebuyers
Year: 2021
Type: article
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.
Source: Consumption Markets & Culture
Author: Kelcie L. Vercel
Institution: Augustana University
Language: English
Subfield: Marketing
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: University of Notre Dame
OpenAlex ID: W3133567149