The bizarre tricks estate agents are now using to sell a house

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It’s hard to trust someone when they’re trying to sell you something. When they’re trying to persuade you to spend several multiples of your annual salary on something you’ve only seen for about 10 minutes, it’s even harder.

So it’s not much of a surprise that estate agents are among the UK’s least trusted professions. According to the 2025 Ipsos Veracity Index, only 32 per cent of us “generally trust them to tell the truth”, compared to scores of over 80 per cent for nurses, doctors, teachers or engineers (though they beat journalists, who got 26 per cent).

Still, the profession doesn’t make it easy for themselves, especially now that they have a whole array of new AI-enhanced tools at their disposal. Generative AI might only have been mainstream for a few years, but estate agencies have been enthusiastic early adopters, often to the frustration of would-be buyers and sellers.

Buyers told me of agencies using artificial intelligence to “fill” a small living room with furniture that could not possibly fit inside it. Others reported AI being used to make bins and rubbish disappear from the yard, forgetting that it would still be there and visible the moment they visited.

Other cases were more drastic: a home on a busy street full of cars was advertised with pictures showing a quiet, peaceful road. The agency had removed all of the vehicles from the picture of the street, but had forgotten to remove the shadows – making their edit job incredibly obvious.

These kinds of mishaps seem to be an increasingly common occurrence: one person told me a graveyard next to a home they visited had been airbrushed out of pictures, while another saw pictures of a home with a newly installed kitchen – only to arrive at a house where the kitchen had only bare, mouldy walls. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they decided not to put in an offer.

One particularly bizarre editing choice stood out in the mind of a tenant whose home was being rented out. When she looked at the online pictures of her home, her cat Penny – who had been sitting in the living room – had been reduced to a strange black smear across the rug on the floor (thankfully, the real Penny was fine).

Some of the individual incidents are harmless or even funny. But the overall effect of the AI estate agent era is to create an even wider gulf between the reality of the homes we’re looking to buy and the image of them that we are presented. We see a clean, modern, spacious home online, only to arrive at a cramped, damp and dirty one when it comes to a viewing.

The practice is widespread. More than half of UK estate agents said they planned to use AI in some part of their business this year, according to industry research, and there are no specific rules governing the practice – though if pictures are significantly misleading, they may fall foul of the UK’s existing consumer protection regulations.

Britain has the oldest housing stock in Europe, and it often shows. But because we have built nowhere near enough homes to keep up with demand, prices have increased far more rapidly than earnings.

What used to be a “starter flat” for someone in their 20s, affordable on an early career salary, is now the home that a high-earning professional couple can afford in their 30s. What used to be a normal family home in London is now attainable only by a family in the top 10 per cent of earners, and even then, probably only with help from parents or other relatives.

One way of softening the blow if we’re spending a lot of money on a product is to market it as luxury. If we’re spending a lot on a meal, we start to see a lot of words like “grass-fed” or “farm-fresh”. Marketers try to give us the impression that we are getting more for our money. Estate agents are left to do an extreme version of this, trying to make very normal but very expensive properties seem like a high-end or aspirational home.

It is hard for us to rationalise that a very normal basement flat in London that sold for £70,000 or so in 2000 now sells for £500,000 or more. This creates a kind of cognitive dissonance for a would-be buyer: on some level, we want to feel like it’s “worth” the astronomical sum we need to hand over to make it ours.

Estate agents have become the people responsible for bridging that gap between our expectations and the realities of British homes. That used to mean “dressing” a home with aspirational accessories, tidying it up, and using fish-eye lenses to make rooms look slightly bigger. Now, they have far more tools in their arsenal.

At least before AI came around, the rubbish was actually cleaned out of the garden and the house was actually tidied. Now, even that marginal benefit is a thing of the past, because it can just be edited out of images. Agencies don’t seem to worry about what happens when the buyer arrives and sees the reality. Perhaps they are just aware that we have few other choices.

The UK’s stagnating housing market is only making things worse. Sellers don’t want to cut prices, but changes to letting rules mean buy-to-let landlords are selling up and higher mortgage costs make housing harder to buy. Estate agents are pulling out every trick they possibly can to get the prices sellers insist upon.

Estate agents are not responsible for the UK’s housing crisis, but they do act as its handmaidens. The UK housing market is a disaster. We have badly insulated, badly maintained, ageing homes selling at prices that ordinary families simply can’t afford – embedding generational wealth inequality, too.

Estate agents have the unenviable job of packaging the necessity of paying a huge price tag for a regular home as something aspirational or luxurious. That’s no small task. No wonder they need to resort to every questionable trick in the book to do it.