It is twilight on a desirable street in Chiswick, or it could be Hampstead, Wilmslow or Hove. A spectacular sunset has left a vivid stripe of orange fading into a violet sky. Against this saturated backdrop, a large Victorian house is clearly outlined despite the darkening atmosphere, perhaps thanks to the lights blazing from every single room. The effect is dazzling, in an unhinged, halfway-through-an-exorcism way. It is also quite obviously fake: a digital trick previously achieved with software such as Photoshop, but increasingly using quicker, cheaper AI programs.
If you are one of the many Britons for whom browsing expensive property listings is a big pastime, you’ll be familiar with the dusk shot, one of the many ways estate agents try to make their wares stand out in the endless scroll of Rightmove, Zoopla and Instagram. It is a level of artifice that most of us are prepared to overlook. We understand we are being sold a dream and we are generally happy to be transported to a world untroubled by the energy crisis, nosy neighbours or natural shadow.
But only up to a point, as estate agents at a branch of Winkworth in south London discovered recently. A disgruntled homebuyer took to Reddit to grumble that the reality of a property they viewed through the agency did not match up to the photos, some of which had been AI-enhanced. They said the home was in poorer condition and felt smaller than it appeared in the listing, and that a chimney breast had been removed in the imagery. It was only later, said the prospective buyer, that they noticed a disclosure of AI enhancement on some pictures. Winkworth took down the images and said the use of AI staging was merely to help buyers “visualise the potential of a property” and had always been disclosed online.
Judging by the strength of the response to the Reddit post, this was not a one-off experience. In the AI era, house hunters regularly come across questionable images in listings, a practice known as “housefishing”. One friend spotted the same north London house listed with two agents who had each staged it with different AI-generated furniture. Another, searching for a country house last Christmas, was confronted with a barrage of The Holiday-style snow-furred cottages. “I just couldn’t believe agents thought that was what buyers wanted to see and then actually followed through on it,” he says.
“AI is simply the latest way of putting lipstick on a pig,” says buying agent Nina Harrison of Haringtons. “I recently had a client send me details of what he thought was a fantastic new instruction. It wasn’t. It was the exact same house we’d already viewed and rejected. The photographs had been refreshed, the marketing rewritten, and it looked so different online that he didn’t recognise it. If I hadn’t spotted it, he would have gone back to view the same house for a second time.”
Maryna Terletska/Getty Images. Illustration: Guardian Design; Gemini AI
The use of AI images can stray from the ridiculous to the vexatious, as in the case of one first-time buyer who made the 75-minute drive from her home in south Wimbledon to Maidenhead to view a house listed for £635,000, which had been dressed and cleaned up with AI. “The main bedroom was pictured online with a big bed with bedside tables and a large wardrobe. We walked in and thought: ‘Huh, OK, this wasn’t what we were expecting.’ You definitely couldn’t have fitted any of that furniture in there alongside a bed.” She and her boyfriend chose not to confront the estate agent about the misleading images of the bedroom: “We were still at the stage where we needed agents to help us and alert us to things that were coming on to the market”. But that experience did make the couple more sceptical of the listings they were viewing. They learned to avoid anything that had even a whiff of AI about it, and approached properties with very low expectations.
Things were not always this way. Back in the 90s, when many of today’s senior estate agents were starting their careers, it was frequently the agents themselves taking the photos – squeezing into awkward corners to capture the best angles and dashing the film roll to the high street photo shop for speedy processing, says Andrew Marshall, now a sales director at Hamptons. A maximum of three images would make it into the physical brochure, and a set would also be dropped off with the advertising department of the local paper.
When fisheye lenses became commonplace, Marshall says, it was still largely the agents themselves wielding them at first. “It was only for very special properties that we would hire a professional photographer,” he says. Even in Hampstead in north London, where high house prices meant professional photography was the norm, James Morton, now an associate director at Goldschmidt & Howland, recalls spending much of the early 90s gluing photos into brochures to be stuffed into envelopes and posted out.
It was the launch of a new online property listings portal called Rightmove in 2000 that heralded the widespread professionalisation of property photography. Ben Gutierrez launched his agency Photoplan Bookings two years later and now operates throughout the country. “Once companies like us came along, the guys who were still showing up with their cameras round their necks, measuring up for floorplans while they were trying to win the instruction, didn’t look so professional. They started to have the air of a one-man band,” he says. And so a new era of heavily stylised, visually led property listing, where the sun always shines and the grass is always green, was ushered in.
“We’ve always added blue skies to photos, we’ve always brightened images, we’ve always used wide-angle lenses, we’ll take out a bin here or there if we need to,” says Gutierrez. “Our level of editing is minor: we’re taking out clutter or adding furniture if a client wants virtual staging (much cheaper than the old-school method of renting physical furniture to photograph) – anything that can be moved. We’re definitely not changing anything structural. We’re making the property look the best it can, not altering reality.”
That doesn’t mean clients don’t sometimes ask, says Doncaster-based photographer Ben Harrison, who works throughout the UK. “I’ve been asked to remove a load of houses behind a property so that it looks like it’s on its own on a mountain. I’ve been asked to erase an electricity pylon. There was a house that had a boiler on the wall and they asked me to remove it in the photos because it would put people off. I say no every time. People are going to view the properties and they’re going to see the other houses, or the pylon, or the boiler. It’s about trust: if you’re selling a product, it needs to look like the thing people are buying.”
The law agrees. Although the Property Misdescriptions Act 1991 was repealed in 2013, real estate listings are now covered by the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. This says that “it is an offence to knowingly or recklessly provide false or misleading information which causes a consumer to take a different transactional decision than they would otherwise have”. The National Trading Standards office says that while not explicitly prohibited, in its view the use of AI to edit property listings to mislead consumers contravenes the act. If they think a property has been misrepresented, buyers should complain to Citizens Advice or to local authorities’ Trading Standards teams. Penalties can include imprisonment, fines and bans from estate agency work.
“Consumers don’t complain often enough,” says buying agent Henry Pryor. “The legislation is really clear: if something has been misrepresented, then you have recourse and the penalties will sting. But as long as images are clearly labelled where they have used AI, the law is reasonably relaxed – and in my opinion it should be. An awful lot of people lack the imagination to see past what is physically in front of them. People should not be misled, but it’s not misleading people to help them understand what a property could look like.
“Similarly, if an estate agent has taken the photos at 3am when there’s no traffic, it is on you, the buyer, who is potentially about to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds, to find out what the street is like at rush hour. It is not an estate agent’s job to give a fair representation of a house; it is their job to – legally, honestly and decently – sell it on behalf of their client.”
Speaking of clients, many of the agents I speak to say it is usually sellers who pile on the pressure to show homes in the most flattering light. “Most sellers will say to us, ‘Can you just take that car out?’ or, ‘We’re about to redecorate the house; can you just change the colour of those window frames?’” says Daniel O’Brien, director of estate agent Aucoot. “I think you need to know where your moral compass lies.”
As Pryor says, it is not necessarily misleading to show how a home could look with new furniture, or even a total renovation. After all, agents have been using CGI to sell as-yet-unbuilt homes for decades. The crucial point is that computer-generated or heavily manipulated images should be labelled as such.
Well-established tricks of the trade are also easier to read. You may not be able to tell exactly what a room will look like in reality when it has been photographed with a wide-angle lens, but you at least know which aspect of it has been manipulated.
Almost all agents and photographers now use AI and other enhancements in some capacity. Multiple online platforms offer editing and retouching services such as virtual staging or room emptying, lawn replacement, object removal, repainting walls and even lowering toilet lids at the click of a button for less than £20 per month, putting once specialist abilities within reach of anyone. In one sense, this is a welcome change from some of the smartphone pictures that still make it online, especially on lower-priced properties for which the commission is not high enough to warrant paying a professional (nor, indeed, forcing recalcitrant teens to get out of bed or doing an angry tenant’s dishes). But the extent and skill with which they are used can vary wildly.
“My pricing means I’m able to only shoot a couple of projects in a day. I edit my photos myself using various tools,” says Harrison. “I know some people now will shoot 10 homes in a day and outsource their editing to cheap studios abroad, where they use AI to keep costs and time down – but that’s where mistakes come in. People want to believe what they are seeing.”
Ultimately, bad AI “enhancement”, with its eerily smooth edges and shadowless furniture floating across rooms, is counterproductive. Property listings lose most of their informative value if buyers no longer trust what they are looking at, and if they cannot estimate how much it might cost to renovate, clear or make habitable a property. But should we just shrug our shoulders and recite the homebuyers’ motto – caveat emptor – if the worst that might happen is that buyers waste time on a disappointing viewing? Or are we at the vanguard of something more sinister, where it is not just the odd bit of furniture that has been fabricated but even the people apparently enjoying the results?
“Scroll through the Instagram feed of a global developer or watch the promotional videos in the windows of high street agents and you will see smiling young professionals raising glasses on freshly furnished terraces and satisfied workers shaking hands in shiny new office spaces. Some of those faces belong to happy customers; some are paid models with signed releases. A growing number are entirely AI-generated,” says Mohamed Mussa, executive director of Chestertons Global. “Platforms are openly marketing realistic avatars for property marketing, with over 2,000 synthetic faces available in 110 languages. A developer can generate a convincing video of a satisfied buyer praising a Canary Wharf apartment in fluent Mandarin, without a single real customer ever having visited the building, for almost nothing.”
Almost every industry is now exploring what AI can do for it, and we can only hope that the sanctions ultimately outweigh the rewards of faking it. “Social media is full of reverse-image searches and viral posts exposing the gap between the listing and the reality,” says Mussa. “The exposure, when it comes, can be fast and very public.” He adds that regulation across the EU and US is already tightening. In the meantime, we might all have to get a lot better at filtering – and calling out – the slop.
