Want to Sell Your Home for the Best Price? New Study Says Make Sure to Include Photos of Plants in Your Listing

BALTIMORE, Nov. 12, 2026 – Anything you put in front of a prospective homebuyer can either help or hurt your chances of making the sale. This includes everything from the written description, graphics, video, and of course, photos. A new study looked at how photos of plants are used in online real estate listings, and more specifically, whether home profiles with more images of plants, versus fewer images, systematically differ in how a home is valued.

The study, which was published in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, found that online profiles with more plant images tend to have higher transaction prices, as well as faster transaction speeds and higher levels of online engagement.

The study, “Visual Plant Imagery and Property Valuation: A Descriptive Analysis,” was conducted by Yuqian Chang of the Ivey Business School at Western University, Nathan Fong and Maureen (Mimi) Morrin of Rutgers University – Camden, and Ning Ye of Stockton University.

The study authors were guided by the phytophilia theory, which proposes that humans have an innate attraction toward plant life. They first surveyed 98 professional real estate agents. Only 2% and 5.1% voluntarily mentioned plants when asked for general advice or presentation tips for sellers. When agents rated and ranked 15 common tips, adding exterior and interior plants received the lowest scores.

The study authors then analyzed a large, representative sample of 40,294 homes sold in the United States (drawn from 1,000 zip codes over a six-month period in 2019) which included 569,773 digital images. After classifying each image as plant-containing or not using artificial intelligence (AI), the researchers examined associations with transaction prices and other outcomes. This narrowed the sample down to 31,031 home profiles.

The researchers found that there is a positive association between plant image count and sale prices. Homes with more plant images sold for higher prices; the relationship persisted after conditioning on property and neighborhood characteristics, home presentation features in the images and texts, and marketplace conditions and expectations (including zip-code fixed effects and the platform’s own pre-sale value estimate).

These types of patterns revealed themselves for faster home sales and greater online engagement (views, likes, and tour sign-ups, etc.).

“Our findings suggest that plant imagery, an aspect of home profiles that has received little attention, is systematically associated with property valuation,” said Chang. “The association held after accounting for a wide range of objective attributes, presentation quality measures, and market factors, and it was stronger for interior than exterior images, for earlier-appearing images, and in areas where plant images are currently less common.”

“Because the data are observational, we do not claim that adding plant images causes higher prices,” said Fong. “But there is a correlation. These patterns identify a managerially relevant association that merits further causal research and may help sellers and agents think more deliberately about how homes are visually presented online.”

The study authors noted that plant imagery is a relatively stable visual attribute of a listing and that two otherwise similar homes can be presented differently solely on the basis of how much plant life appears in their photos.

“Neglecting to pay closer attention to plant imagery can cost home sellers money, and possibly lead to longer delays in selling their homes,” added Morrin. “Even after organizations account for size, location, condition, and other traditional factors, listings that featured more plants still showed systematically higher valuations in the data.”

Read the full study HERE

About INFORMS and Marketing Science

INFORMS is the world’s largest association for professionals and students in operations research, AI, analytics, data science and related disciplines, serving as a global authority in advancing cutting-edge practices and fostering an interdisciplinary community of innovation. Marketing Science, a leading journal published by INFORMS, publishes research on quantitative marketing, consumer behavior, pricing, and strategy that informs managerial and policy decisions. INFORMS empowers its community to improve organizational performance and drive data-driven decision-making through its journals, conferences and resources. Learn more at www.informs.org or @informs.

###