Home staging in Central Iowa is less about furniture rental than most sellers expect. In the National Association of Realtors 2025 Profile of Home Staging, 51% of home sellers' agents reported that they did not stage homes before listing at all, but recommended that sellers declutter or correct property faults instead. The same report found 49% of sellers' agents saw staged homes spend less time on the market, and 29% of agents reported a 1% to 10% increase in the dollar value offered. Both things are true at once, and the gap between them is where sellers in Ankeny, Ames and the rest of the corridor should spend their money.
NAR surveyed agents on both sides of the transaction, and the room priorities line up consistently. Among home buyers, staging the living room ranked highest at 37%, followed by the primary bedroom at 34% and the kitchen at 23%. The guest bedroom came in at 7%.
Sellers' agents stage along similar lines: the living room (91%), the primary bedroom (83%), the dining room (69%) and the kitchen (68%). The practical read is that effort belongs in the rooms a buyer stands in and imagines using. A perfectly styled guest room is not where offers come from.
Eighty-three percent of buyers' agents said staging made it easier for a buyer to envision the property as their future home. That is the actual job. You are not decorating. You are removing the friction between a buyer walking in and picturing their own life in the space.
NAR asked agents what they recommend to sellers, and the answers were not expensive:
That is the order I work in too, and it is the order I would hold to even on a tight timeline. Decluttering is free and it changes how large a room reads in photos. A deep clean, including baseboards, grout, inside the oven and the window glass, is the cheapest value you will ever add. Curb appeal sets the expectation before a buyer reaches the door, and a buyer who pulls up disappointed is already discounting the inside.
On cost, NAR reports a median of $1,500 for a staging service, compared with $500 when the sellers' agent handled staging themselves. Worth knowing before you assume staging means a five figure line item.
Entry. Clear the floor completely. Winter coats, boots and bags belong out of sight by October. One mirror or one piece of art, nothing else.
Living room. Pull furniture off the walls slightly and create one obvious conversation grouping with a clear walking path. If you have an oversized sectional in a modest room, moving one piece to the garage will do more for your photos than anything you could buy.
Kitchen. Counters hold no more than three items total. Everything else goes in a cabinet. Remove the magnets, the calendar and the papers from the refrigerator door.
Primary bedroom. Simple bedding, matched lamps, nightstands cleared to one object each. Closets at roughly half capacity so the storage reads as generous.
Bathrooms. Every personal product off the counter and out of the shower. Fresh white towels, folded. Shower curtain open, toilet lid closed in every photo.
Basement. In this market the basement is a real part of the value, and sellers routinely let it become the staging area for everything they removed upstairs. Do not. If your basement is finished, show it finished. If it is unfinished, show it clean, dry, swept and well lit, because buyers read a tidy mechanical room as a maintained house.
Garage. A two or three stall garage is a selling feature here and it should be walkable. Sweep it and get the bikes and totes off the floor.
Three local realities shape fall showings in the Ankeny to Ames corridor.
Daylight is going. By late October a weekday evening showing happens in the dark. That means every exterior light needs a working bulb, the house numbers need to be visible, and a lamp on a timer in the front rooms is not a small detail. Get your listing photos taken in good light now rather than three weeks from now.
Leaves and the yard. A lawn that is tidy one day looks neglected two days later. Plan on clearing leaves before every showing block and before any photo or video shoot, including the gutters and the driveway edge.
The furnace and the smell of a closed house. Once windows stay shut, a house develops a scent its owners stop noticing. Pets, cooking and a damp basement all register to a buyer in the first ten seconds. Air the home out before showings and skip the heavy plug-in fragrance, which reads as covering something up. Service the furnace now as well, because a buyer's inspector will get there eventually and so will the heating bill question.
If you are selling a resale home in Ankeny, Waukee, Grimes or Bondurant, your competition includes a brand new model home down the road with a professional decorator's work inside it and nothing in the closets. You cannot win on newness. You can win on condition and on the things a new build does not have yet: mature trees, a finished basement, a fenced yard, window treatments, a yard that is actually landscaped.
So lead with those. Make sure the photos show them, and make sure the walkthrough does not require the buyer to look past clutter to find them.
This is the line that matters most. NAR's language is to "correct property faults," and correcting a fault is the right call. Hiding one is not, and in Iowa it is a legal problem, not a styling question.
Fix the running toilet, the sticking door, the cracked outlet cover and the gutter that drains against the foundation. Do not stack boxes in front of a foundation crack or repaint over a water stain and leave it at that. Iowa's seller disclosure obligations are specific, and I cover what you have to put in writing in what Iowa sellers are legally required to disclose. Repair it and disclose it, or disclose it and price for it. Those are the two honest paths.
Presentation does not substitute for price, and price does not substitute for presentation. A home that is priced right and shows poorly sits. A home that shows beautifully and is priced above the comparable sales also sits. My framework for the pricing half is in How to Price Your Home in Central Iowa, and the seller net proceeds calculator will show you what a longer time on market does to your bottom line once you account for carrying costs. For the full cost stack, see what Iowa sellers actually net at closing.
What this means for your strategy: Spend your preparation budget in NAR's order, which is declutter, clean, then curb appeal, and concentrate it in the living room, the primary bedroom and the kitchen. Shoot photos while the light is still good. Handle the fall specifics, which are leaves, exterior lighting, air and the furnace. Repair and disclose real defects rather than staging around them. Then price to the comparable sales, because presentation and pricing only work together.
If you want a room by room plan for your own house, start with the seller's guide and the staging checklist there, or get a current read on value with the home value tool. When you are ready to talk timing and what your home needs before it goes live, reach out. A clear, straightforward walkthrough with Jackson Krile and the Flanders Team at RE/MAX Real Estate Center, no pressure either way.
Source: National Association of Realtors, 2025 Profile of Home Staging, released May 6, 2025. NAR surveyed a random sample of active Realtors in February 2025 and received 1,266 usable responses, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.75% at the 95% confidence level.
Jackson Krile | Flanders Team | RE/MAX Real Estate Center
515.490.8614 · Jackson@FlandersTeam.com
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