When you’re hunting While browsing real estate listings for a up-to-date home in Franklin, Tennessee, you come across a vertical video showing wide-ranging rooms with a four-poster bed, a fully stocked wine cellar, and a soaking tub. In the corner of the video, a smiling real estate agent walks through your dream home in a soothing tone. It looks perfect – maybe a little too perfect.
Hook? Everything in the video was generated by artificial intelligence. The property is completely empty, and the luxurious furniture is the result of virtual staging. The intermediary’s voice and facial expressions were born from text prompts. Even the tardy panning of the camera through each room is controlled by artificial intelligence because no video camera was actually involved.
Any real estate agent can create “exactly this at home, in minutes,” says Alok Gupta, a former product manager at Facebook and software engineer at Snapchat who co-founded Automatic reelan application that allows real estate agents to turn photos from real estate listings into videos. He said between 500 and 1,000 up-to-date listing videos are created every day using AutoReel, and real estate agents across the United States and even in Novel Zealand and India are using the technology to promote thousands of properties.
It is one of many AI tools, including better known ones such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, that are rapidly transformation of the real estate industry into something that isn’t necessarily, well, true.
“I’ve attended several conferences over the last few weeks and, anecdotally speaking, we ask 100 people in the room how much they use AI and I say 80 to 90 percent of people raise their hand,” says Dan Weisman, director of innovation strategy at the National Association of Realtors, the largest real estate association in the U.S. “We are seeing a huge increase in the number of people using this solution.”
Like most industries, the industry’s biggest names are rushing to adopt a wave of generative AI products, making gigantic promises to raise productivity, lower costs, and revolutionize every aspect of the consumer experience. But when it comes to renting or buying a home, which is typically the most costly part of adult life, the exploit of AI-generated photos, videos and listing descriptions can make the process even riskier.
Elizabeth, a rural Michigan homeowner who didn’t want to exploit her last name for privacy reasons, monitors local real estate listings to stay up to date on the value of her home.