Should I AI it?
Should I AI It out? The other day I was standing in an agent’s kitchen. Her team is one of our best clients, and we’d just arrived to shoot some lifestyle photos for one of their newer promotions. She had her laptop open on the counter, scrolling through listings. Normal day for her: checking the competition, looking for a home for a buyer, pulling comparables, working out the price point for her next listing, or any of the thousand other reasons agents look at what else is on the market.
Then she stopped on one and waved the four of us over.
AI-generated image depicting the exact scenario that you shouldn’t do!
It was stunning. A shot from the front hall looking up the stairs and down the corridor to the rooms beyond, the same kind of shot we’ve done plenty of times (usually for this client, actually). Crisp white trim, a carpet runner so tight you could bounce a quarter off it, warm hardwood glowing all the way down the hall, every spindle sharp. The kind of light that makes you want to move in.
It. Was. Perfect.
She clicked to the next photo.
Same house, same layout, same staircase. The carpet was matted, the walls were scuffed, the floors had lived a long life, and the shot itself was dark and crooked. Somebody took that poor photo of a tired hallway, fed it to AI, and got back a house that doesn’t exist.
Think Tinder catfish. The first photo gets the swipe, sure. Then the buyer walks through the front door, sees the real staircase, and the date’s over before the shoes come off. Now they’re wondering what else in the listing they can’t trust, and that lands on the agent, not the photographer and not the app. Push it far enough and you’re into misrepresentation, a conversation nobody wants to have with RECO. To be fair to the listing agent (in case you’re wondering, I didn’t note who it was, or the address) the original was there as per the current rules – but so was the shock factor!
Here’s the thing about a too-good photo: it doesn’t make the house any better. It just moves the disappointment from the listing to the front door. Buyers who drove across town or into a different town for the house in the photos aren’t thinking about crown moulding when they walk in. They’re thinking, “What else did they fudge?” And that’s a tough mood to sell a house into.
We use AI daily in our edits. Sky swaps, a garbage bin on the driveway, wires to TV’s or electronics, our reflections or the camera in a bathroom mirror: we clean that stuff up on every shoot. Virtual staging works great too, as long as you disclose it in the remarks. The trouble starts when the edit stops cleaning up the house and starts building a new one. Remember, AI Invents what it can’t see; it’s alway perfect rather than reflecting reality – a stain underneath that carpet, an oil spill underneath that car, stain behind the garbage bin in the kitchen or the neatly piled of boxes hiding a hole in the wall that the AI doesn’t know is there.
If you’re not sure where that line sits, I wrote a short guide for agents called “Should I AI It Out?” It lays out what’s fair game and what’s going to earn you an awkward phone call.
Grab it free here: Should I AI it Out? – Link
Why we’re so picky about it
We’re in the business of making homes look their best, not making them look like somewhere else. A listing photo is a promise, and the showing is where you keep it. Our job is to make that promise easy to keep, and that means the photos and the house need to tell the same story.
