Real Estate Is Entering Its AI Slop Era

As you’re hunting through real estate listings for a new home in Franklin, Tennessee, you come across a vertical video showing off expansive rooms featuring a four-poster bed, a fully stocked wine cellar, and a soaking tub. In the corner of the video, a smiling real estate agent narrates the walk-through of your dream home in a soothing tone. It looks perfect—maybe a little too perfect.

The catch? Everything in the video is AI-generated. The real property is completely empty, and the luxury furniture is a product of virtual staging. The realtor’s voice-over and expressions were born from text prompts. Even the camera’s slow pan over each room is orchestrated by AI, because there was no actual video camera involved.

Any real estate agent can create “exactly that, at home, in minutes,” says Alok Gupta, a former product manager at Facebook and software engineer at Snapchat who cofounded AutoReel, an app that allows realtors to turn images from their property listings into videos. He said that between 500 and 1,000 new listing videos are being created with AutoReel every day, with realtors across the US and even in New Zealand and India using the technology to market thousands of properties.

This is one of many AI tools, including more familiar ones like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, that are quickly reshaping the real estate industry into something that isn’t necessarily, well, real.

“I’ve been at a few conferences over the past few weeks, and just anecdotally speaking, we’ll ask out of 100 people in the audience how many are using AI, and I’d say 80 to 90 percent of people raise their hand,” says Dan Weisman, the director of innovation strategy at the National Association of Realtors, the largest real estate trade association in the US. “We are seeing this huge uptick in people using it.”

Like most industries, the biggest names in this one are rushing to embrace a wave of generative AI products making big promises about increasing productivity, cutting costs, and revolutionizing every aspect of the consumer experience. But when it comes to renting or buying a home, which are typically the costliest parts of adult life, the use of AI-generated photos, videos, and listing descriptions can make the process feel even riskier.

Elizabeth, a homeowner in rural Michigan who did not want her last name used due to privacy concerns, keeps an eye on local real estate listings to stay abreast of her own home’s value.

“About two or three weeks ago was the first time that I’ve truly seen actual pictures of a house fed through AI,” she says. The first thing that stuck out to her was that the images in the listing had a yellowish hue, which has become a colloquially recognized sign of AI to the point that there are now other AI tools that purport to “UnYellow” AI-generated images.

“And then, as I was scrolling through the photos, I noticed that some things just weren’t making sense. There were stairways leading to nowhere,” Elizabeth says. “In general, it just looked cartoonified.”

Her suspicions were confirmed when she came across a second listing for the same property and saw the original images that had been transformed. In the edited versions, kitchen cabinets were missing, backyard pavement was replaced by grass, and windows were dramatically resized. Elizabeth posted the two sets of images on Reddit in the popular “mildly infuriating” subreddit, and more than 1,200 people commented.

“This is misleading. It’s distorting the features of the house,” she continued. She says real estate listings often use a fish-eye lens to make rooms look bigger, but with AI “we’ve entered a whole new realm.”

Elizabeth isn’t alone. Examples of consumer outrage over potentially AI-driven misleading listings have cropped up all over social media in recent months, from a New York City apartment listing on StreetEasy where a tiny loft became a master bedroom to an edited house facade, complete with a new roof, in Detroit. WIRED reached out to the real estate agent behind the New York City listing and has not received a response. A real estate agent whose number was included on the Detroit listing said the images were made by a broker and posted prematurely and that she wasn’t sure if AI was used.

Still, industry leaders aren’t necessarily concerned, and some say the profit margin makes the tools a no-brainer.

“Why would I send my photos of an empty room to a virtual stager, have them spend four days and send it back to me at a charge of 500 bucks when I can just do it in ChatGPT for free in 45 seconds?” asks Jason Haber, a licensed realtor and cofounder of the American Real Estate Association. “We’ve done virtual renderings for 20 years, so the fact that you can just do it now on AI, there was a whole cottage industry of virtual renderings and those people are now looking for a new job.”

In his position leading an association with over 22,000 members, Haber stresses that real estate professionals must disclose the use of AI, just like virtual staging has been disclosed in the past. Deceptive real estate practices can lead to fines and lawsuits, and the National Association of Realtors has advised realtors that the legal territory around using AI-generated images is still “murky.” The organization’s code of ethics prohibits using misleading images.

Haber said there are telltale signs of an “epidemic” of lazy AI use in the industry that outsiders may not be able to spot. Specifically, Haber says that ChatGPT “almost always” inserts the word “nestled” into copy it generates for real estate listings. The phrases “nestled in a prime location,” “nestled in the heart of the city,” and “nestled between two other homes” can be evidence of agents copying and pasting directly from the AI chatbot, he wrote on Instagram.

Haber says while he embraces technology, it’s not an excuse to “check your brain at the door.”

“If you become just a toll taker, you’re not a really good agent. You have no differentiation, you’re not creative, you’re just another agent,” Haber says.

Gupta, the cofounder of the AI real estate video generator, says as social media has become a primary avenue to reach consumers, high-quality videos that can hold their attention have become crucial. Using AutoReel could save “$500 to $1,000” and up to a week’s turnaround time from professional videographers, he claims.

“When we started this two years ago, we kind of got a no from customers,” Gupta says. “In 2024, they started saying ‘tell us more.’ And then this year, they’ve been asking How do I get started?”

But not everyone in the industry is entirely convinced. Nathan Cool, a real estate photographer who runs an educational YouTube channel with almost 100,000 subscribers, has experimented with AI tools, including AutoReel. He still feels like shooting vertical video is an easy and cheap add-on to his other services, although some productions can be more involved and costlier.

Plus, there’s the continuous issue of AI hallucinations. Gupta says that AutoReel is trained on millions of real property videos and has been fine-tuned to avoid inserting things that aren’t there—generating videos that zoom in versus rotate to try to stop the AI from creating features that aren’t really there. In a single test run with real photos from a real estate listing, this worked, although uploading the edited images from the listing Elizabeth found resulted in AutoReel adding in a fake couch.

But even when the AI products are realistic enough to fool consumers, Cool says that many everyday people are already sick of AI-generated videos in their social media feeds, and looking for a home raises the stakes.

“People that want to buy a house, they’re going to make the largest investment of their lifetime,” he said. “They don’t want to be fooled before they ever arrive.”