You're staging the photographs.

Because most buyers start online and decide from the images whether to book a viewing at all. That makes the listing photos the product, and effort spent on a room the camera never enters is effort wasted. It also sets a hard deadline: anything not finished before the shoot isn't in the listing, and improving a room afterwards only reaches people who already decided to come. Most staging advice treats the photos as an afterthought, which is backwards.

Usually not, and the course is direct about it. Substantial work like a new kitchen or bathroom generally recoups only a fraction of its cost, and it delays the listing while the market moves. What does earn its place is repairs rather than upgrades — a cracked tile, a dripping tap, a sticking door and chipped paint all make buyers wonder what else was neglected, and that turns into negotiation. Neutral paint over strong colours is one of the few improvements that reliably pays.

Plausibly, and you won't get a number here. Much of the widely quoted return data comes from industry surveys with an obvious interest in the answer, and market conditions dominate — in a fast market staging matters less, in a slow one it matters more. What's well supported is that decluttering and depersonalising help, that they're cheap, and that the photographs decide whether anyone views at all. That's enough reason to do it without inventing a percentage.

Smell. People acclimatise completely to their own home and genuinely cannot detect it, while a buyer notices within seconds and nobody will ever tell them. Ask someone who hasn't visited recently to be blunt. And deal with the source rather than masking it — heavy air freshener reads as covering something up, which lands worse than the original smell did.

Staging is presentation; concealment is different. Moving a wardrobe to hide a damp patch, painting over mould, or covering a leak rather than fixing it can amount to misrepresentation with real consequences after completion, and disclosure obligations vary by jurisdiction. The rule is fix it or declare it. There's also a practical version: prepare a truthful, brief answer to the question you're dreading, because an evasive response does more damage than the fact itself.