AI is cursing renters with the promise of impossible homes

“Virtual staging” might be able to cram a six-seater dining table into a studio apartment, but tenants can’t.

“Virtual staging” might be able to cram a six-seater dining table into a studio apartment, but tenants can’t.

Joyce, a native New Yorker, didn’t think finding her first solo apartment in the city would be easy. But she also didn’t think it’d be “hell.” After looking at a lot of tiny, overpriced places she described as “shitholes,” 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 like it had been recently renovated. She dropped everything to see the apartment, and when she got there, she learned that five other women, all around her age, had viewings scheduled after hers.

“I get in, and it’s not the same apartment at all,” she told me. It was much smaller than it looked in the pictures. The kitchen sink was different. The stove was missing several knobs. There was no fireplace. “There’s the idea of the apartment that we saw in the pictures,” she said, and then there was the apartment itself. “My friend said we should’ve known it was AI because there was a plant on the gas stove in the picture.”

New York City brokers have always had a knack for making even the most run-down apartments look passable in photos, but generative AI has given them the ability to do so with the click of a button. For renters, this means spending even more time scrutinizing every listing to avoid ending up in an apartment that looks far better online than it does in person.

Virtual staging isn’t new, but AI is. Bee, a Realtor who works in Florida who asked that her last name be withheld for privacy reasons, said virtual staging often helps people envision how they could refurnish or remodel a home. “You’d be surprised how little creativity a buyer or renter has,” she said. “Virtual staging could be anywhere from, like, $40 to $400 based on what you’re having these stagers do, whereas real-life staging can’t be done for under a couple grand.”

She showed me a photo from one of her active listings, a house with furniture she described as “dated.” The living room had plush sofas, an ornate wood coffee table, a Persian-style rug, and heavy drapery. Then she showed me the way she redecorated it with ChatGPT. The white sofa, track lighting, and plain, woven rug were decidedly modern. She said the edited photo isn’t going on the listing, but she does share it with clients to demonstrate how they could update the space.

Real estate agents and brokers have several virtual staging tools at their disposal. Bee’s favorites are Stuccco and BoxBrownie, both of which charge per listing. But Bee said there’s a difference between using virtual staging software to show what a house could look like with new furniture and a few DIY upgrades, and using AI tools to create misleading listings. “There’s a lawsuit waiting to happen,” she said. “I think ‘digitally altered’ is not accurate. I don’t necessarily put ‘digitally altered’ if I have AI make a bed, but ‘digitally altered,’ to me, says, ‘I patched a hole.’”

Madison, a Queens resident, said she wanted to get a head start on looking for apartments before her lease is up in the fall. In her six years of living in New York, she’s found apartments via Facebook groups and, once, through a post on the queer dating and classifieds app Lex. This time, she’s been looking on StreetEasy, where she’s seen a proliferation of AI-enhanced listings.

“I think scammy or misleading pictures for apartments have existed for as long as internet listings for apartments have, but it’s really egregious now,” she said. Whereas pre-AI real estate scams included photos of totally different apartments, “now I’m looking at a picture of a room that more or less looks real until you start looking at the details of the furniture and things like that, where they clearly took a picture of the actual room and said, ‘Hey, ChatGPT, can you put some furniture in this for me?’”

Some states are starting to crack down on AI-enhanced listings. New York recently implemented a law mandating disclosure of AI in ads, but the legislation mostly focuses on “synthetic performers,” not on AI-generated furniture. But the New York secretary of state did issue a warning last year about misleading AI-generated or AI-enhanced listings, noting that brokers are already prohibited from posting dishonest advertisements.

California’s recent Altered Image Law goes a step further, requiring anyone advertising property to disclose when they’ve used AI to alter or enhance images. But much like broker and Realtor regulations, laws governing the use of AI in listings and other advertisements vary from state to state.

Joyce, who found an apartment after searching for several months, said that even the descriptions appear to be AI-generated. “Everything is ‘charming.’ Everything is ‘cozy.’ You notice the same wording patterns over and over again, where everything has ‘spa-like finishes,’” she said. “Brokers are already so dishonest, and now they have, like, the lying machine in their pocket.”

• Gaby Del Valle