My Dayton STR didn't sell in the usual window and I'm trying to figure out if staging hurt more than it helped

That outcome is frustrating, and the question you're asking is a genuinely hard one to answer cleanly, for anyone.

Here is why the comparison data you're looking for is difficult to get: staged and unstaged listings almost never share identical conditions. Same street, same week, same price point, same days on market, same buyer pool, that combination basically never exists in a clean pair. Most of the published staging research compares averages across large samples, and at the $220k price point in a mid-market Midwest city, the sample gets thin fast. So you are probably not missing some obvious study. The clean data largely does not exist.

What I can say about your specific situation: $3,200 is roughly 1.4% of your original list price. If staging had held your price at $229k, it would have paid for itself about twice over. It did not, but we cannot know whether an empty house would have closed faster, slower, or at the same number. The market softening you described in weeks four through eight is a real variable that staging could not fix. Staging helps buyers visualize a finished life in a space; it does not manufacture demand when buyer activity drops.

The price point question you raised is worth sitting with. Some agents who work the $200k to $250k range in secondary markets will tell you buyers at that level are less influenced by furniture and more focused on condition and price. I would not treat that as settled fact, but it is a conversation worth having with a local agent who has data on your specific zip code.

One thing worth checking: what did your DOM (days on market, meaning the number of days between listing and accepted offer) look like against unstaged listings that closed in Dayton in that same window?

What did your listing agent say about why traffic dropped after week three?

Dayton sub-250k is mostly owner-occupant buyers, and the feedback I keep hearing from the dispo calls I sit in on is that buyers at that price point are imagining their own stuff in the room, not responding to something that reads like an Airbnb photo shoot. Three weeks of traffic and then a wall sounds like the pool of motivated buyers who could close at 229k just ran out, and the market did not replenish fast enough before your days on market started spooking the rest. Your 3,200 staging cost and your 8k price reduction are basically the same problem compounding, not two separate ones. What was your average DOM on comparable STR conversions in that zip in the six months before you listed?

What did the agent say about who was actually walking through after week three?

The 94 days is doing more work in this story than the staging bill. In Dayton at that price point, if you go quiet after week three, something is wrong with the listing itself or the comp set, not the furniture rental. I had a unit in Wrocław sitting at a similar relative price band, tenant just left, I cleaned it out and shot photos the same week, and it moved in 19 days. The one before it I over-prepared for six weeks and watched the window close. The market does not wait for you to feel ready.

What I would actually want to know is what the DOM looked like on the five closest comps that closed while yours was sitting. If those were also running 70-plus days, your 94 is just the market and the 3,200 is a separate question entirely. If they were closing in 30, then something about your specific listing was broken and staging is probably not the variable that broke it. The price drop to 221k is what closed it, not whatever you changed about presentation, so I would spend more time asking whether 229k was ever the right number than whether the rental sectional confused anybody.

The misconception worth clearing up is that staging ROI data is almost never clean because staged and unstaged properties rarely match on condition, days-on-market start date, or agent quality, so any "staging adds X percent" statistic you find is averaging over a lot of noise.

What you can actually do is pull the MLS data for Dayton zip codes in the 200-240k band, filter for closings in that same 94-day window, and separate by whether the listing photos show furniture or not. That is a rough proxy, but it narrows the comparison to your actual market and your actual period rather than national survey data. The more useful number in your situation is whether your price-per-square-foot at 221k landed above or below the unstaged comps that closed in the same window, because if it did, the staging may have held the floor even as time worked against you.

The thing worth separating out is traffic pattern: you said decent showings for three weeks and then nothing. That dropoff pattern is more consistent with a pricing ceiling in the buyer pool than with a staging problem, because staging fatigue or wrong-demographic staging usually produces low traffic from day one, not a cliff at week four. Did your agent pull the showing feedback from weeks four through eight, and did it cite price or something physical about the property?