Property buyers and renters say the use of AI in listings on portals such as Rightmove amounts to "false advertising" and wastes the time of everyone involved.
Jessica Otterwell, hunting for a flat in Brighton, put it to the BBC in terms nobody is likely to improve on: "It's like if you went to buy a car because the picture was of a brand-new Mercedes and you turned up and it was a Skoda with one wheel."
The practice has acquired a name. Some are calling it "housefishing".
Why agents are doing it
The economics are not mysterious, and they are worth stating because they explain why this will not stop on its own.
An estate agent in Sussex said physically staging a property with furniture can cost up to £50,000. Generating the same impression in software costs almost nothing and takes minutes.
Staging works — an empty room photographs badly and a furnished one photographs well, which is why the industry has paid for it for decades. AI offers the same uplift at effectively zero cost. Given that, the surprising thing would be if agents were not using it.
Where the line sits, and why it is blurred
Rightmove — a portal that aggregates listings from agents rather than selling or renting directly — says AI-generated imagery is allowed on the site if it is clearly labelled.
That is a defensible rule. The problem is compliance. The BBC has seen listings watermarked "Virtually staged" or "Artificially enhanced" — and many others where nothing was disclosed at all.
A labelling rule that is widely ignored is worse than no rule, because it creates an expectation that unlabelled means genuine. A buyer who has learned to look for the watermark will trust the listing that does not carry one.
The distinction that actually matters
There is a real difference between two things both described as AI enhancement, and it is the difference between decoration and deception.
Adding furniture to an empty room shows a buyer a possibility. The walls, the windows, the proportions and the light are all still the property's own. Changing the light, widening the room, removing the pylon outside the window or repairing visible damage shows a buyer something that does not exist.
The first is staging by other means. The second is a different flat. Current labels do not distinguish between them, and "artificially enhanced" covers both.
What an agent said about the point of it
An agent in Surrey drew the line more simply than any policy has: "Technology should help people, not deceive them."
That is the test worth applying, and it is one a reader anywhere can use. Bangladesh's property listings carry retouched photographs too, with no portal rule at all. Until disclosure is enforced rather than permitted, the only reliable protection is the oldest one — do not form a view of a property from the pictures, and visit before you decide.
How to spot one
Generated staging still gives itself away if you look at the edges rather than the furniture. Check where floor meets skirting board, where a sofa leg meets a rug, and any reflection in a window or mirror — those are the places the model guesses and gets slightly wrong.
Straight lines are the other tell. Door frames, radiator fins, tiles and ceiling joins should stay straight across the whole frame. Where they bend gently near an object that was added, the room has been edited rather than photographed.
