How the Staging King of New York Moves Million-Dollar Homes

With 10,000 works of art, a library of pillowcases, and a whole lotta knickknacks, Jason Saft can make any space feel like home. 

Even after decades in New York City, Jason Saft doesn’t own a subway farecard. He doesn’t rely on cabs, either. Instead, the 48-year-old is a devoted cyclist, riding for function over thrill. “I was always late for stuff. I was always like, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. The subway got stuck,’” he recalls. “I found myself often saying, ‘I don’t have any control over this,’ and I realized, I do actually have control.”

In fact, Saft has built a career on control—as a New York City real estate agent for more than a decade and now, as the founder of Brooklyn-based staging firm Staged to Sell Home.

Where others see blank rooms, Saft sees blank canvases upon which to begin telling a new story, offering prospective buyers something aspirational, instead of overwhelming emptiness.

Saft’s visual narratives don’t just help his listings stand out in a sea of million-dollar listings—they almost guarantee a sale. Staged to Sell Home touts a 98 percent homes-sold rate. In 2024, he says, his company staged 124 listings totaling $300 million. And that over the course of his entire two decade-plus career in real estate, he’s staged 1,000 homes worth over $3 billion in sales.

With numbers like that, it’s easy to see why Saft has never been more assured about the value of his work. “You are hiring someone who is absolutely fixated on creating something that transacts, that motivates people to make offers, that increases lead generation,” he says. “That then creates this fever pitch that leads to a stronger offer.” 

Take a unit at 481 Washington Street, which sat on the market for nearly four years before Staged to Sell Home arrived to enliven it. The apartment sold just 12 days after staging, despite a last-minute redesign when a key sofa failed to clear the elevator. “I do love and I thrive on that. The install, the magic of what happens,” he says. “I find sometimes those are the most creative parts.” 

The grandchild of Russian immigrants, Saft recalls a curio cabinet of heirlooms and decor punctuating his childhood in Levittown, on Long Island. Raised by a single mom working two jobs, he collected design magazines, hoarding them beneath his bed to pore over after dark. All this refined an appreciation for beauty as well as a sensibility for how little it took to make a space—including some of his own, less flattering apartments—sing. 

But Saft owes his success to his creativity as much as to his work ethic. 

For much of his time as a real estate agent, he pedaled a set of wheels equipped with a “super industrial reinforced basket” crafted by a specialty bike shop in Manhattan. The customized storage empowered Saft to transport artwork and knickknacks that he would use to stage his listings across the city. Many of those items, in the early days, came from his own apartment. He couldn’t afford a car either, he says, “So I would just bike accessories and coffee table books and all this stuff,” he says. “If I could, I would make six trips in one day.” 

Things are different now. With a 10-person team, 48 active listings worth $272 million, and 16 currently in production, Saft’s days of solo schlepping are behind him. And his staging inventory has grown substantially as well. 

Staged to Sell Home’s 175,000-item inventory, which includes almost 10,000 works of art, now resides in a sprawling, 24,000-square-foot warehouse in South Brooklyn’s Industry City, and is catalogued in an Airtable database, though Saft says his own mental index is just as reliable. “I do a lot of it in my head,” he says. “It’s weird. I can see it.” 

Good thing—because the collection has been relocated multiple times. In 2022, Staged to Sell Home moved into a Brooklyn Navy Yard warehouse, consolidating the collection from 19 storage rooms spread over four floors in Manhattan. Then, the company moved its inventory again to its current home in Industry City over the course of three months in 2023. The third-floor space is bedecked with row after row of high shelves heaped with sundry duvets, art, books, ceramics, and even toys—all with the potential to add thousands of dollars in value to a listing. 

Staging days, meanwhile, unfold like a ballet, with a tried and true methodology dictating every step. Saft and his team work from the floor up, installing rugs in each room before positioning any furniture. Close to 50 different elements are typically necessary for composing a bedroom—and that doesn’t include accessories and knickknacks. Artwork goes up last, with the dimensions of each painting noted on their backs. Should anything require onsite measurement, rolls of tailor tape are always on-hand. 

“There’s this sort of structure and synchronicity,” he says. “There’s choreography to it.”

Choreography is something Saft learned not onstage but at the fryer. On his 14th birthday, he entered a McDonald’s in Levittown looking for a job. He quickly ascended the ranks, cutting his teeth on the efficient dance that keeps drive-thrus running smoothly. “I climbed the fast-food-french-fry ladder very quickly because I wanted more. I wanted to learn, I wanted to do—and that’s how I look at design,” he says. 

Saft migrated to Boston to study at Northeastern University in 1995. When he returned to New York in 2000, the dance continued—this time working in public relations for the Karpel Group, where, unprompted by leadership, he says he applied his head for efficiency to help streamline operations, and added value by producing market reports and user feedback sheets. 

“I was taught at a very early age that if anyone ever calls you and asks you for something, you have not done your job,” he says. 

Things were going well until Saft “lost everything” to a rat infestation in 2003—a classic New York tale. “This was before iPhones, Zillow, and Streeteasy,” he says, so finding a new apartment was “daunting and soul-crushing.” But it led him to a new fascination: “I followed real estate the way some follow sports. While talking about how challenging finding a rental was, several people suggested that I should be in real estate. I thought a lot about it and eventually got my license.”

And so Saft leaped from PR on over to real estate, where got the attention of Gordon Golub in 2004. At the time, Golub was the manager of Citi Habitats’ Upper East Side branch office, and was impressed by the way Saft handled a few of Golub’s listings. He brought Saft on to work on some of his projects and eventually became his mentor. When the Corcoran Group acquired Citi that year, there were 20 offices and more than 800 agents and staff.

New to the game, Saft explored how he—and his listings—could stand out. “A lot of what you were competing against,” he says, “were people who were just born into having connections or married into the right association. And if you don’t have any of those things, you have to offer something that no one else can.”

Faced with naked interiors more dreary than dreamy, and what one might call a minimalistic budget, Saft got scrappy. “I’d add the shower curtain, I’d add two pieces of art,” he recalls. “Whatever I could to make the space look a little bit better, but most of it was things that came from my apartment.”

Time spent changing out lighting fixtures, painting cabinets, and removing moldy grout from bathtubs in the hours before and after work did not go unnoticed, and one manager tapped Saft for a challenge. “He said to me, ‘I know you like aesthetics and you’re into design. I have this landlord I’ve been working with for a decade. He needs some help at this building.’” Saft staged one unit, and it rented within weeks. The landlord “was very impressed,” Saft says, and had him start handling other rentals in the building, with the help of a small inventory of staging furniture that Saft proposed purchasing and storing onsite.

Almost immediately after his first few sales, Saft began drafting a meticulous deck of success stories to attract clients. The exercise, which is still ongoing, gives him a chance to define his ethos as well. “I often say I’m a problem-solver and a marketing expert, and it’s sort of all visually based,” he says. In the early days, the deck contained staging advice for agents and photographers. Its current form, which spans nearly 200 pages, features verifiable success metrics and select projects from the past 10 years. 

 A competitive edge then and now, the document, at its core, exists to answer a familiar argument from cynical owners. “Are you focused on saving $4,000 or are you focused on the apartment going into contract in two weeks and avoiding $45,000 in maintenance charges over the next six months?” Saft says, replaying a frequent counterpoint. “While it might appear to you like you’re hiring someone to put furniture in an apartment, you are hiring someone to increase the value of your home and cut the days on market in half.” 

By 2013, Saft had joined Urban Compass, now Compass, and continued to build his staging portfolio. With success came bigger budgets to aggregate new furniture, new photographs, and more high-end listings. It also yielded greater expenses for Saft, who was “living paycheck to paycheck.” He “very slowly built an inventory as I started to get bigger projects,” he says. “I would run to CB2 and place a huge order. If the contract got signed and the funds hadn’t even come in yet, I was running to whatever mass market store I knew that had really good looking stuff that I could get delivered in a week or two weeks.” 

Stakes also increased as Saft began welcoming estate clients, many of whom resided in some of New York’s most storied addresses. He oversaw projects for families at 34 Gramercy Park East, the city’s oldest surviving co-op, as well as the former Romanoff residence at 1136 Fifth Avenue, where he received “carte blanche” authority to effect its transformation. 

“If I had two hours for it, I’d get on the bike and I would just go up there just to bond with the space,” he says. These hallowed halls saw Saft “handling things that are worth more than anything in my entire life and most people I know combined,” he jokes. The most memorable? Just an original Sargent. 

But fancy trappings and steady sales proved insufficient for Saft, whose insecurity grew both pecuniary and personal. The din of self-doubt clouded his vision, especially any notion of venturing out of his own. “I spent more time talking myself out of it,” he says. “I didn’t really believe I could start a business.” 

Just as with his bike, though, Saft eventually realized he did have control. He shifted his decisive eye inward, and found an internal vacancy in need of an overhaul. 

First, he got sober in 2016. “I was drinking to not deal with the problems,” he says, “the voices in my head that were from childhood.” Then he became a father. “Your priorities shift, the way that you think shifts, the way that you manage your time,” he says of parenthood. “You balance things in a way and you get very serious.”  

With a clear mind and clear correlation between his practice and profits, fulfillment outweighed fear. “I lost all my money [buying inventory] and all my hair, but I didn’t care when it started to click. My whole life, I just wanted to design,” says Saft. “I didn’t really care if I was losing money because there was always this part of me that was like, ‘Somehow I’m going to figure this out and make it up.’” 

The work remained meditative even at the onset of Covid. Saft traversed the virus’s early fallout, biking alone to the Upper East Side to work on his only two active projects at the time. It was inside 141 East 95th Street where he indeed figured it out. “I was just there on my own and I was working and I was like, ‘This feels right,’” he recalls. “‘If the world’s going to burn down, I want to be here doing this.’”  

Shortly after Compass went public in 2021, Saft says he shifted gears and started working on Staged to Sell Home full time, re-incorporating the business in 2021. And so far, he says, demand is certainly not an issue.

“There is this huge appetite for anything that is perceived as turnkey,” he explains. “Most people, I hate to say it, don’t want to do the work, and I understand it. If you think about the people we know, and their jobs and the stress and the time, do they want to spend their weekends running around to tile stores and looking at fixtures?” 

Choice, or its chimera, may be to blame. Zillow and StreetEasy empower today’s buyers, but technology has yet to groom a more discerning population. “I do think it’s a little bit like dating. There are almost too many options and too much information,” Saft adds. “It’s restricting some people from committing to something because there is always that idea of what else is around the corner.” 

But the biggest factor in today’s marketplace is the unknown. For Saft, tariffs and mounting socioeconomic instability forecast the imminence of a major slowdown. “Intelligent people are going to say, ‘I can’t make these big decisions right now when there’s all this uncertainty,’ especially the upper tier of the market. Most of these decisions are made because of profits from stocks,” he says. “No one knows what the fuck is going on.” 

Luckily, no trends or omens cloud Saft’s aesthetic vision. Nestled into a corner of his warehouse beside his most beloved sculptures and statement pieces, Saft is surrounded by reminders of his journey and the bounty reaped along the way. “Five years ago, I would be standing in a nine-by-nine cement storage room with no light, no electricity,” he says. “I used to sit on a box and I would fold all the pillowcases for hours, just because it had to get organized.” 

Now with an entire library of pillowcases, Saft is affirmed by his intuition and with more than 50 active projects on the boards, he’ll continue to trust what got him here. He’ll remain informed, reading The Real Deal and listening to the Business of Home podcast. He’ll pedal ahead, ever in momentum upon his bike. “You’re always working on a pipeline of business, but it’s funny. That’s what fuels me,” he says. “There are these great victories, but then there’s the next challenge.”