Joyce, a New York native, didn’t think it would be easy to find her first solo apartment in the city. But he also didn’t think it would be “hell”. After looking at a number of smaller, overpriced places that she described as “stupid”, Joyce found her dream apartment: a reasonably priced studio in Manhattan.
“It was big and airy, and there was a fireplace,” she said. The kitchen was small but well equipped and looked as if it had been recently renovated. She dropped everything to see the apartment, and when she got there, she learned that five other women around her age had scheduled to see the apartment after her.
“I go in, and it’s not the same apartment at all,” she told me. It was much smaller than it appeared in the photos. The kitchen sink was separate. Many knobs of the stove were missing. There was no chimney. “The apartment is the same idea we saw in the pictures,” she said, and then there was the apartment itself. “My friend said we should have known it was AI because there was a plant on a gas stove in the picture.”
New York City brokers have always had a knack for making even the most shabby apartments look walkable in photos, but generic AI has given them the ability to do so with the click of a button. For renters, this means spending even more time checking each listing to avoid walking into an apartment that looks far better online than it does in person.
Virtual staging is nothing new, but AI is. Bee, a realtor working in Florida, who asked to withhold her last name for privacy reasons, said virtual staging often helps people imagine how they might renovate or remodel a home. “You’d be surprised how little creativity a buyer or renter has,” she said. “Virtual staging can be anywhere from, like, $40 to $400, depending on what you’re having these stagers do, whereas real-life staging can’t be done for less than a few grand.”
She showed me a photo of one of her active listings, a house with furniture she described as “old.” The living room featured plush sofas, an ornate wooden coffee table, a Persian-style rug, and heavy curtains. Then he showed me how he decorated it with ChatGPT. The white sofa, track lighting and simple, knitted rug were decidedly modern. She said the edited photo isn’t going into the listing, but she shares it with customers to demonstrate how they can update the location.
Real estate agents and brokers have many virtual staging tools at their disposal. B’s favorites are Stucco and BoxBrownie, both of which charge per listing. But Bee said there’s a difference between using virtual staging software to show what a home could look like with new furniture and some DIY upgrades, and using AI tools to create misleading listings. “There is a lawsuit waiting to happen,” she said. “I think ‘digitally altered’ is not accurate. If I make a bed with AI I don’t necessarily want ‘digitally altered’, but ‘digitally altered’, to me, says, ‘I’ve punched a hole.'”
Madison, a Queens resident, said she wanted to start looking for an apartment before her lease ends in the fall. In her six years living in New York, she found apartments through Facebook groups and, once, through a post on the bizarre dating and classifieds app Lex. This time, she’s keeping an eye on StreetEasy, where she’s noticed a proliferation of AI-enhanced listings.
“I think fake or misleading photos for apartments have been around for as long as internet listings for apartments have existed, but now it’s really serious,” she said. Whereas pre-AI real estate scams involved photos of completely different apartments, “Now I’m looking at a photo of a room that looks more or less real until you start looking at details of furniture and things like that, where they obviously took a photo of the actual room and said, ‘Hey, ChatGPT, can you put some furniture in it for me?'”
Some states are starting to crack down on AI-enhanced listings. New York recently enacted a law mandating the disclosure of AI in advertisements, but the law focuses mostly on “synthetic artists,” not AI-generated furniture. But New York’s Secretary of State issued a warning last year about misleading AI-generated or AI-enhanced listings, adding that brokers are already banned from posting dishonest ads.
California’s recent altered image law goes a step further, requiring anyone advertising a property to disclose when they have used AI to alter or enhance images. But like broker and realtor regulations, laws governing the use of AI in listings and other advertising vary from state to state.
Joyce, who found an apartment after several months of searching, said the descriptions also appear to be AI-generated. “Everything is ‘attractive’.” Everything is ‘comfortable’. You notice the same patterns of words over and over again, where everything has a ‘spa-like’ finish to it,” she said. “The brokers are already very dishonest, and now they have like a lying machine in their pocket.”
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