Yes. Staging, professional photography, and marketing expenses are all ordinary and necessary business expenses for a real estate agent. They’re deductible on Schedule C, which is where sole proprietors and independent contractors report business income and expenses.

This covers a wide range of listing-related costs. Professional photography, drone footage, 3D virtual tours, video walkthroughs, and Matterport scans are all deductible. So are staging company fees, furniture rentals, and any decor you purchase specifically for staging a listing. If you’re paying for it to market and sell a property, it qualifies.

Marketing expenses beyond the listing itself count too. Print flyers, direct mail postcards, yard signs, open house supplies like food and refreshments, online advertising through Zillow or Facebook or Google, your website hosting, and any agency or freelancer fees for content creation. All deductible. Even branded promotional items you hand out at open houses fall under advertising expenses.

The one thing to watch is who actually paid. If the seller covers staging costs directly or reimburses you, you can’t deduct that amount because it wasn’t your expense. Same if you co-list a property with another agent and split photography costs. Only deduct the portion you personally paid. This seems obvious but it gets messy when expenses are being passed back and forth during a transaction. Keep clear records of what came out of your pocket versus what was reimbursed.

Beyond tax deductions, there’s a real business reason to track these costs per listing rather than lumping everything into a single “marketing” category. When you know exactly what you spent to market a specific property, you can calculate your actual cost per transaction. That number tells you whether your marketing spend is proportional to your commission income on each deal. An agent spending $3,000 to market a listing that earns a $6,000 commission has a very different margin than one spending $800. You can’t optimize what you don’t measure, and most real estate agents have no idea what their true per-transaction costs look like.

In QuickBooks, you can use classes, tags, or projects to assign expenses to individual listings. This takes a few extra seconds per transaction but gives you reporting that actually shows where your money goes. If you’re not sure how to set that up, it’s worth getting help so the structure works from the start rather than trying to fix it later.

Keep receipts and documentation for everything. A $2,400 charge to a staging company is easy enough to explain, but smaller expenses like open house supplies or boosted social media posts add up over the year and are easy to forget or lose track of. Digital receipt storage through an app or even a simple photo folder on your phone is better than a shoebox of fading paper. Your Phoenix bookkeeping service or tax preparer will need this documentation if anything is ever questioned.

The bottom line is that almost every dollar you spend to market listings and close deals is deductible. The real opportunity most agents miss isn’t the deduction itself but tracking those expenses well enough to understand their actual profitability per transaction.