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.