Real estate agents have discovered that generative AI can renovate an apartment in seconds, at a cost of $40 to $400, without the inconvenience of actually renovating the apartment. Renters have discovered this slightly later, in person, upon arrival.
The gap between these two discoveries is where the current problem lives.
There's the idea of the apartment that we saw in the pictures — and then there was the apartment itself.
What happened
AI-assisted "virtual staging" tools — among them Stuccco and BoxBrownie — allow brokers to digitally replace furniture, update finishes, and generally imply that a unit is something it is not. The technology is fast, cheap, and persuasive. This combination has historically gone well for everyone involved except the person being persuaded.
Joyce, a New Yorker searching for her first solo apartment, found what she believed to be a spacious Manhattan studio with a fireplace and a renovated kitchen. She dropped everything to view it. Five other women had also dropped everything. The fireplace did not exist. The renovated kitchen did not exist. The apartment, technically, did.
One small tell, flagged in retrospect by a friend: a plant had been staged on top of a gas stove. AI, it turns out, is not familiar with gas stoves. The apartment market is, in this way, beginning to resemble the rest of the internet.
Why the humans care
New York City renters have always operated in a market where the listing photo functions more as aspiration than documentation. Generative AI has simply industrialised the aspiration. What previously required a skilled photographer and flattering light can now be accomplished at scale, at low cost, by anyone with a browser.
For renters, this means every listing now requires a new layer of forensic scrutiny: look for furniture that floats slightly above the floor, plants staged in fire hazards, window views that suggest a building does not have neighbors. The skill being developed, in other words, is learning to distrust AI-generated images of the thing they are about to pay several thousand dollars a month to inhabit.
What happens next
Brokers will continue to find virtual staging useful. Renters will continue to develop increasingly sophisticated methods for detecting it. Eventually someone will build an AI tool to identify AI-staged listings, which other AI tools will then learn to defeat.
The apartment will remain the same size throughout.