the stager wants 8 weeks minimum. my last two sales took 61 and 74 days.

What happens if you go under contract in week five and it falls apart in week seven? Does the 12 week clock keep running or does she pull the furniture and charge a fresh install to bring it back? I'd want that written down, because a re-list with no furniture in it after the buyer walks sounds like the worst version of this.

Your 18 to 20 days faster came from the person selling you the service, which doesn't make it wrong, it makes it unusable as an input. Ask her for the address list of the last 15 vacant stages she did in your price band and the list dates, then check days on market yourself through whatever your local board publishes. She may not give you prices and in your state she probably can't, but list-to-pending dates are usually visible and that's the number you're actually buying. If she won't produce the list, that tells you something too.

One thing your carry math leaves out is that the 1,410 a month keeps running whether or not the house is staged, so the staging fee isn't competing with the whole carry, only with the difference in months. If the effect is 18 days you save about 900 of carry, so on 2,775 of spend the carry saving alone doesn't cover it. The staging has to also move the price by something like 1,900 net to break even, which on 289k is under 0.7 percent. That's a small enough number that I'd stop trying to prove it and just decide whether you believe the direction.

windlass has the right frame and I'd go further. On thin-margin flips I've stopped treating staging as a line I optimize and started treating it as the cost of not being the ugliest empty box in the search results. Buyers in that band scroll photos on a phone. An empty three bed at 289k next to two furnished ones loses the click, and losing the click costs more than 2,550.

The piece I'd push back on with you, verity, is the half month prorated extension. Get her to confirm in writing that de-install is included in both packages and that she schedules it within five business days of your call. I've had furniture sit two extra weeks after closing because the truck was booked, and guess who got billed.