Artificial intelligence has not taken long to reach real estate portals with all kinds of scams, now they even generate fake images. Sellers have begun using these tools to touch up some of the most distressed properties.
Owners are using generative AI tools to furnish old rooms, move walls, paint facades, create fictitious landscapes or add natural light in rooms without windows. Clients get a huge surprise soon after when they visit the homes.
Home ads with AI-generated images
DeAnn Wiley, a children’s book illustrator, was looking for a home when she found some suspicious images on online platforms. The condition of the homes and their location was too beautiful to be true for their price.
Wiley has recounted his nightmare finding an apartment in the United States in an interview for Slate. One of the homes caught his attention, the façade was impeccable in an area of Detroit where rents are almost double that of the offer.
The finish on the exterior of the house was so good that it made him suspicious; shortly after, he found that the owner had retouched the photograph of the facade with artificial intelligence. The transformation also reached the interior with rooms that erased the dirt accumulated over decades, freshly painted walls and a renovated floor.
Experts are beginning to warn about this practice. “The biggest risk is not outright falsification, but subtle manipulation,” according to Kevin Greene, CEO of real estate company Cotality for Slate . “Tools that can brighten a photo also remove electrical wires, add trees, or replace grass with a pool—that’s where you start to cross the line,” he adds.
Old houses that look modern by magic
The growing concern among buyers looking for a home has not been an obstacle for real estate companies, which take advantage of this need to do business. Companies save thousands of euros in costs with the help of AI.
The advent of AI has led to the creation of companies such as AutoReel, founded by Alok Gupta, former product manager at Facebook. The company transforms images of properties into short videos.
Gupta assures that the owners They can save between $500 and $1,000 by not using a professional photographer. Agencies no longer want to send photos of an empty room to a virtual decorator and wait days for a response, they can do it for free with ChatGPT in a few seconds.
Users are condemned to investigate each of the images of the homes they want to buy or rent. If an offer is too good to be true, they must now suspect that it may have been tweaked with AI. In addition, rental applications have few filters at the moment to avoid these types of scams.