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.<\/p>\n
If you are one of the many Britons for whom browsing expensive property listings is a big pastime, you\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> 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 \u201cvisualise the potential of a property\u201d and had always been disclosed online.<\/p>\n double quotation markIt\u2019s about trust: if you\u2019re selling a product, it needs to look like the thing people are buying<\/p>\n 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 \u201chousefishing\u201d. 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<\/a>-style snow-furred cottages. \u201cI just couldn\u2019t believe agents thought that was what buyers wanted to see and then actually followed through on it,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cAI is simply the latest way of putting lipstick on a pig,\u201d says buying agent Nina Harrison of Haringtons. \u201cI recently had a client send me details of what he thought was a fantastic new instruction. It wasn\u2019t. It was the exact same house we\u2019d already viewed and rejected. The photographs had been refreshed, the marketing rewritten, and it looked so different online that he didn\u2019t recognise it. If I hadn\u2019t spotted it, he would have gone back to view the same house for a second time.\u201d<\/p>\n A plain all-white bedroom is shown on the left hand side while on the right, a boldly decorated bedroom can be seen with a teal coloured bedspread, matching art on the wall and gold cushions.<\/a>From bland to bold \u2026 a plain bedroom gets an AI makeover. Photograph: 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 \u00a3635,000, which had been dressed and cleaned up with AI. \u201cThe main bedroom was pictured online with a big bed with bedside tables and a large wardrobe. We walked in and thought: \u2018Huh, OK, this wasn\u2019t what we were expecting.\u2019 You definitely couldn\u2019t have fitted any of that furniture in there alongside a bed.\u201d She and her boyfriend chose not to confront the estate agent about the misleading images of the bedroom: \u201cWe were still at the stage where we needed agents to help us and alert us to things that were coming on to the market\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n Things were not always this way. Back in the 90s, when many of today\u2019s senior estate agents were starting their careers, it was frequently the agents themselves taking the photos \u2013 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.<\/p>\n When fisheye lenses became commonplace, Marshall says, it was still largely the agents themselves wielding them at first. \u201cIt was only for very special properties that we would hire a professional photographer,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n double quotation markYou need to know where your moral compass lies<\/p>\n 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. \u201cOnce 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\u2019t look so professional. They started to have the air of a one-man band,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve always added blue skies to photos, we\u2019ve always brightened images, we\u2019ve always used wide-angle lenses, we\u2019ll take out a bin here or there if we need to,\u201d says Gutierrez. \u201cOur level of editing is minor: we\u2019re 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) \u2013 anything that can be moved. We\u2019re definitely not changing anything structural. We\u2019re making the property look the best it can, not altering reality.\u201d<\/p>\n A pink bathroom is seen on the left while a more modern, white bathroom can be seen on the right.<\/a>A dated bathroom gets a glow up. Photograph: Martin Deja\/Getty Images. Illustration: Guardian Design; Gemini AI<\/p>\n That doesn\u2019t mean clients don\u2019t sometimes ask, says Doncaster-based photographer Ben Harrison, who works throughout the UK. \u201cI\u2019ve been asked to remove a load of houses behind a property so that it looks like it\u2019s on its own on a mountain. I\u2019ve 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\u2019re going to see the other houses, or the pylon, or the boiler. It\u2019s about trust: if you\u2019re selling a product, it needs to look like the thing people are buying.\u201d<\/p>\n double quotation markIt is not an agent\u2019s job to give a fair representation of a house. It\u2019s their job to sell it on behalf of their client<\/p>\n
Maryna Terletska\/Getty Images. Illustration: Guardian Design; Gemini AI<\/p>\n