the agent says don't bother staging the house on my 9 acres

Your agent's argument has a testable version. Pull the last 10 sales of houses on 5 plus acres in that price band and see what fraction of the listing photos are exterior and land. If eight of ten photos in the successful listings are drone, fence line and barn interior, she's right that the marketing dollar belongs outside. If the photo sets are dominated by kitchens and living rooms, she's guessing. Ask her for the photo sets, she has access and it takes 20 minutes.

Land buyers at 168k on 9 acres are usually doing one of two things, buying a place to live with room around it or buying acreage where the house is a bonus. Those two buyers want completely different photos. The first one absolutely cares whether the ranch feels livable, and an empty dated interior reads as a project to them. Spend the money on the survey being clear, the well and septic paperwork being available, and the barn photographed like it's an asset. Then decide about the sofa.

On your mechanical questions, since those have straightforward answers.

The 2,400 is a service fee that bundles design time, delivery, install, and the use of her furniture for a period, usually 30 days. You are not renting the furniture from a rental house directly and you never own it. It stays her inventory, insured and tracked as hers, and it leaves when the term ends or the sale closes. At closing the standard sequence is that de-install happens after possession is settled, so read the agreement for who is responsible if the buyer wants furniture left in place and for what happens if closing is delayed past your paid term. The 400 a month is her charge for continuing to have that inventory tied up in your house instead of earning in someone else's, which is the real constraint in a staging business.

So yes, five months means roughly 2,400 plus 1,600, and you should ask whether extensions are billed monthly or prorated, and whether de-install is included or billed separately at the end.

On whether staging does anything when much of the value is land, the underlying effect is that well-presented properties tend to sell faster and for more than comparable poorly presented ones. That effect attaches to what buyers are evaluating. If the house is the thing being evaluated, presentation matters. If buyers here are underwriting acreage and outbuildings, presentation of the house matters less and clarity about the land matters more.

One middle option worth pricing: ask the stager for a photo-day-only stage or an occupied-style consult, which is a much smaller fee, gets you usable interior photos, and leaves your marketing budget for the drone work.

The photo-day-only thing rena-expert mentioned is what I'd chase first. Does the furniture come out the same afternoon, and are the photos yours to keep using in the listing for as long as it's live? I've seen people surprised that images had a license window attached to them. Ask the stager and the photographer both, in writing, before the 19th.

Empty rooms photograph small. That's the one thing I'd actually pay for, since an empty 11 by 13 bedroom looks like a closet on a phone screen and a bed and a nightstand tell the buyer it fits a queen. Doesn't have to be 2,400 worth. It has to be enough that nobody scrolls past because your rooms look like storage.

Fix the dead ceiling fan before you spend a dollar on anything else. A dead fixture in a listing photo reads as deferred maintenance and it costs you 90 minutes and 40 bucks. Same for bulbs, all of them matching color temperature, and mow to the fence line so the 9 acres actually shows as 9 acres. On my long-hold land I've found the cheap stuff moves the needle more than anyone expects, and the barn wants to be swept and lit rather than furnished.

Worth asking what the total number is if it sits. Your agent is comparing 2,400 to 600, but the real comparison is 4,000 in month five against 600, plus your carrying cost either way. If you don't know your monthly carry on the parcel, work that out first, because it changes which side of this you land on. I had to do that exercise on my own numbers and it reordered everything.

Your agent might also just not have a stager she likes working with. That's a real dynamic. Ask her directly whether she's ever listed a staged property in this band and how it went, and if the answer is no, her opinion is a preference rather than experience. Doesn't mean she's wrong about the land buyer, it means you're getting one data point dressed up as a rule.

Coming from the build side, the thing that kills dated ranches in photos is surface, not furniture. Yellowed switch plates, brass door hardware, popcorn texture, one wall color that went orange in daylight. A painter and a box of switch plates for maybe 1,800 changes every photo in the set, and then a light stage on top of fresh paint actually lands. Staging over a dingy interior mostly makes the dinginess more visible because there's now a clean crisp sofa next to it for comparison.

One clause to read before you sign anything with her: what happens to her furniture if the house doesn't sell and you decide to rent it out instead. I've been reading through service agreements lately and the exit conditions are usually the part written for the vendor. Ask who pays de-install if you cancel in week two.

The number I'd want from the stager is her own experience with rural acreage listings in your band, and specifically list-to-pending on those. If she has three of them and they all sat, that's more useful than any general claim about staging. Also ask whether her inventory scale fits a 1,450 square foot ranch, because furniture sized for a suburban great room makes small rooms look worse and she may not have a second set.