Source: The Verge
Virtual staging tools have crossed from aspirational enhancement into outright fraud. Agents are adding furniture, renovating interiors, and altering structural features that don't exist, creating a verification problem for buyers who can't reliably distinguish edited from actual spaces. The tools are cheap ($5-50 per image) and frictionless enough that they're becoming standard practice rather than exception, shifting the burden of due diligence onto already-vulnerable consumers in a market where photos are often the first and most persuasive touchpoint. Most markets have no mandatory disclosure requirement, and the FTC's enforcement capacity hasn't caught up to the scale of the abuse.