The House in the Picture

By Gary Payne, MBA Founder of FuneralCostOntario.ca The Fine Print Those four words appear at the end of the online description for an Oshawa bungalow listed for sale this fall. Nothing scandalous about that. The disclosure is right there, where anyone can read it. In fact, it's the sort of information buyers should be getting. The photographs, of course, are where I tend to start. I've spent enough evenings browsing real estate listings to know the routine. First the kitchen, then the yard, then a quick look at whether the living room could hold the furniture. The furnace and property taxes can wait. Somewhere along the way you decide if the place is worth a Saturday drive. Apparently, I may also need to ask whether the living room exists. In 2024, a brick garage on a Toronto laneway appeared in a real estate listing with a rather ambitious future. The building at 194R Chatham Ave. was still a garage, but the photographs offered something else. Some showed a polished loft. Others pushed out walls to create new rooms or imagined a much larger building. The Globe and Mail reported that 15 of the listing's 21 images were AI renderings. The renovation, as impressive as it looked, had taken place entirely inside a computer. Apparently it raised some questions. The Globe reported that callers asked whether the garage was part of a much larger building. The agent removed those exterior renderings. A prospective buyer also complained to the Real Estate Council of Ontario, or RECO. The Globe did not report an outcome. But the agent hadn't hidden what he was doing. The listing included a warning: “Please note that some photos depict conceptual ideas, not actual representations.” He wasn't claiming those rooms had been built. His explanation was understandable. A bare garage is hard to picture as a home, and he wanted buyers to see the possibilities. Some of the imagined changes would have needed city approval. The technology made an unbuilt future look a good deal further along than it was. Real estate photography has always involved a little theatre. Someone arrives with furniture that fits perfectly. The towels are folded as though nobody has ever used them. The camera finds the corner that makes a modest room look like a ballroom. I don't object to any of this. Sellers want their homes to look good, and buyers know the family probably doesn't live with fresh flowers on every table. But putting a nicer chair in a room is not quite the same as putting a room in a building. For most of my life, a photograph carried a fairly simple promise. You might be seeing the house from its one good angle, but somebody had pointed a camera at something. That wasn't a guarantee of much, but it was a start. Now the camera might never have seen the room at all. Ontario already has rules about misleading real estate advertising. Agents must make their best efforts to keep their representations accurate and not misleading, and they're prohibited from engaging in misrepresentation. RECO told the Globe that enhanced images should be identified in a listing and that buyers should visit properties to check what they're seeing. The Toronto Regional Real Estate Board allows virtual staging provided it doesn't materially misrepresent the property. CREA and Realtor.ca don't regulate AI use in listings themselves. That sounds reasonable. So does RECO's advice to go and see the place. Walk through it. Open cupboards. Ask what that stain on the ceiling is. But you can't visit every house. The pictures help decide which ones get a visit in the first place. By the time you get to the front door, they've already done a good deal of selling. The Oshawa bungalow isn't the Toronto garage. Its listing says only that some photos were virtually staged, which doesn't necessarily mean AI was involved. There is no reason to suspect anything improper. Both listings included disclosures, and that's how it should be. Still, a line at the bottom of a description has to compete with a photograph that has already done its job. The actual building was a garage. The beautiful rooms were ideas. Only one of those things was for sale.