Research governance

Virtual-staging disclosure research methodology

Stylst records what a public primary source says, separates explicit requirements from recommendations and uncertainty, and labels our practical guidance as guidance—not policy.

Evidence standard

  1. Use an official law, regulator, association, MLS, or portal source that is publicly accessible.
  2. Record the narrow scope of the source; do not turn general advertising guidance into an invented virtual-staging rule.
  3. Separate mandatory language, recommendations, uncertainty, and Stylst’s own conservative guidance.
  4. Create a detail page only when the source supports enough useful, unique explanation.

What each record contains

Every record identifies the authority, geography, authority type, people or listings covered, source title and URL, publication date when available, last verification date, next review date, disclosure wording, prohibited edits, and a short scope-limited summary. Stylst guidance is stored separately so it cannot be mistaken for the authority’s rule.

Classification rules

Explicit requirement
The cited source uses mandatory language that applies to altered listing imagery or advertising in the recorded scope.
Guidance / recommendation
The source describes a preferred practice without presenting it as a binding rule.
Confirm locally
No useful public virtual-staging rule was verified, the available source is too general, or the source’s applicability is uncertain.

Silence is never classified as permission. General truth-in-advertising language is not converted into invented image-label wording.

Publication and quality controls

A rule receives its own indexable detail page only when its source is public, its scope is identifiable, and the record contains useful source-specific explanation. Generated discovery files include only those qualified details. The directory still shows unresolved authorities so readers can see the research gap instead of receiving false certainty.

The build checks source health, canonical URLs, sitemap inclusion, and disclosure-page generation. Data exports and the human-readable pages are produced from the same records to prevent count and wording drift.

Review and source failures

Quarterly, and immediately after a known policy change. Automated checks flag redirects and access failures. After three consecutive failures, the detail URL is removed from discovery files until a human review; the hub entry remains visible as unresolved research.

Corrections

Email hello@stylst.app with the authority, official source URL, and what changed. Material corrections are dated in the change feed.

Limitations

This is informational research, not legal advice. Login-gated rules, brokerage policies, feed requirements, local customs, and unpublished enforcement practices may apply. The dataset is a documented sample of public sources, not a census of every authority or a substitute for checking the rules that govern a particular listing.