![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/48d571015b2dfe3379463eee76333eaffb-ai-listings.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\n Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Brooklyn Property Group LLC, Zillow Rentals\n <\/p>\n
On a recent Saturday, Teo Bugbee was on line with 20 or so other people outside a Bed-Stuy brownstone, waiting to get a look at what seemed<\/a> like a unicorn apartment. The place, a one-bedroom, two-bath duplex on Tompkins Avenue, was just over $2,300 a month and rent stabilized. The listing photos showed a recently renovated kitchen and a bedroom that was basically out of a West Elm catalogue. But once inside, Bugbee discovered the bedroom was actually a windowless basement. The walls were dirty, the lighting harsh. There was also a weird smell. The source, it turned out, was a trio of teacup piglets being cradled by a woman sitting on the floor of the apartment and\u00a0rocking them in her arms. Bugbee overheard the broker ask another person touring the space, \u201cSo what do you think?\u201d Then they heard the reply: \u201cWell, it\u2019s pretty fucking miserable.\u201d<\/p>\n Along with everyone else who showed up that day, Bugbee had gotten got by the latest indignity of apartment hunting in New York City: AI staging. The list of insults faced by those of us trying to live here is pretty lengthy already. Rents are out of control \u2014 June saw<\/a> all-time highs of $5,295 in Manhattan and $4,350 in Brooklyn. There are the obvious unknowns endemic to a search \u2014\u00a0Do the neighbors party late? Does the bathroom leak? What\u2019s the rat situation like? Anything worth viewing tends to rent in a flash (which is why we\u2019re still increasing<\/a> our own rents just to get any sort of edge). Yes, a bit of deception has long been standard in listing photos \u2014\u00a0a wide lens, a bit of color saturation to make a viewless window appear brighter \u2014 but the tools today are more sophisticated, cheaper, and pretty\u00a0ubiquitous. The issue of what we might call apartment catfishing has even caught the mayor\u2019s attention. He just included an AI-disclosure requirement among his 23 proposals to improve the housing market. (\u201cYou shouldn\u2019t have to worry whether or not the apartment you are viewing online is real,\u201d he recently said.)<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s such a plague,\u201d says Charlotte Rodgers, who is\u00a031 and works as a jeweler. After getting priced out of her Greenpoint rental in February, she found herself on the market for the first time in four years. Things, she learned, had changed. She would click on StreetEasy listings for what appeared to be bright and perfectly finished apartments only to find photos at the end of the carousel of the actual space \u2014\u00a0often dark and dingy. In one case, there were visible holes in the ceiling. (All of which seem to violate<\/a> the listing platform\u2019s policies.) \u201cIt makes me feel like they think I\u2019m stupid\u201d she says. Other apartment seekers, in equal parts public-service announcement and grievance session, have been sharing<\/a> their AI listing horror stories: a clean one-bedroom in South Williamsburg with<\/a> a grassy backyard and new vinyl-plank flooring was, in fact, a dump with gray subfloors. Some of what has been shared there isn\u2019t so much deceptive as glitchy and odd.\u00a0In Fort Greene, a two-bedroom featured<\/a> a staged bed with a nearly identical but smaller bed at its foot, and a third, even smaller bed below that. (This may be because, as Suzanne Goldklang, a New York City real-estate agent who has used ChatGPT for virtual staging, explained, the programs are buggy<\/a>. \u201cYou have to give it a ton of specific prompts \u2026 and even then it ignores the prompts,\u201d she wrote<\/a>.)<\/p>\n \u201cPeople are taking it completely overboard,\u201d says Anna Klenkar, an independent, tenant-side real-estate agent. The problem, she adds, is largely concentrated among \u201cdown-market brokers,\u201d\u00a0which means if it\u2019s affordable and looks halfway decent, it may be a fakeout. Brokers whose listing photos had clearly been staged with AI didn\u2019t respond to my calls, but others I\u00a0talked to told me\u00a0they have a professional obligation to portray a client\u2019s property in the best light possible. Also, they insist, it\u2019s always a light touch: Maybe they\u2019ll add a couch to help clients envision what the space could be. Maybe they\u2019ll blend out some of the cracks in the wall or water stains on the ceiling. (Because the landlord is totally going to fix those!) The apartment you see is the apartment you\u2019ll get, they insist, albeit one that has been slightly yassified to get you in the door and see the potential.<\/p>\n \u201cAnything that has furniture in it seems 50-50 AI,\u201d says Julian Lim,\u00a0 a documentary filmmaker. During his search for a sub-$3,500 two-bedroom last year, he and his wife saw a Greenwood listing<\/a> with an industrial kitchen table that seemed to be growing chairs and leather cushions that were inexplicably on the counter. There was also an office window that had been turned<\/a>\u00a0 into a second doorway in an ad for an Astoria two-bed. At a certain point, he says of the brokers, \u201cyou\u2019re not taking care to even make sure it\u2019s accurately representing your space.\u201d<\/p>\n For most people, AI listing photos are largely just an annoyance,\u00a0a wasted afternoon touring a ramshackle one-bedroom they might not have otherwise given a second thought. But for people who live out of state and need to look for an apartment remotely, the stakes get a bit higher. Joohee Na, who works in educational AI tech, was looking for apartments here while still living in Los Angeles. She came across a listing for a bright one-bedroom, one-bath in Nomad priced at $2,650. Na knew the market\u00a0was competitive and wanted to move quickly to lock it in by giving the brokerage a $500 \u201cgood faith\u201d deposit. \u201cI thought it would be just fine to just see the virtual pictures online and it would be pretty accurate,\u201d she says. Her parents weren\u2019t so sure and convinced her to fly out to see the place in person before handing over any cash. It turned out the ground-floor apartment was in a mixed-use building and looked nothing like the pictures. The place was dark, the fixtures dated, the backyard ratty and overgrown. \u201cThis one was just like a straight-up lie,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n And it may not be the kind of thing we can warn one another away from \u2014\u00a0the market is just that toxic. After leaving the piglet one-bedroom, Bugbee tried to warn the people still waiting to get inside. \u201cI was like, \u2018It doesn\u2019t look like the photos! It doesn\u2019t look like the photos at all!\u2019\u201d Bugbee says. No one really budged. Was this some kind of trick to get an edge on the place? (That is, after all, what Bugbee had assumed about the person who came out of the place saying it had flooded.) People, it seemed, needed to see it for themselves. And apparently, someone still wanted to live there. According to StreetEasy, the apartment rented in late June.<\/p>\n Sign Up for the Curbed Newsletter<\/p>\n A daily mix of stories about cities, city life, and our always evolving neighborhoods and skylines.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n