AI Tools Are Transforming the Home-Buying Experience — But Should You Trust Them?

With the housing market as hot as it’s been, aspiring buyers can turn to new technology to help navigate their search. I’ve used ChatGPT to help redesign my bedroom, and while it was a fun process, I wouldn’t base any substantial design or financial decisions on it. It was finicky, made errors and included inaccuracies.

I came across Collov AI, a tool that’s designed to help realtors transform their online listings and close deals faster. It offers virtual staging, 3D tours and interior design technology. I wanted to look at it from the buyer’s perspective to see if it could help there, too.

Plus, I spoke to an expert about how homebuying negotiations are already changing, with buyers using AI-generated information to guide their talks with realtors and banks — and whether that approach is effective or too error-prone to be useful.

AI Can Help You Visualize a Future Home

With Collov AI, you can browse images from online listings or take photos during showings and upload them to the platform to stage a space, adapt or remove elements and even get furniture recommendations from more than 300 brands. You can also visualize different interior designs and style suggestions without spending thousands of dollars on professional renderings.

You can also take an AI-powered virtual tour by uploading static photos of a space to generate an interactive video walkthrough. (It doesn’t require a floor plan to create the tour; it’s driven by the sequence of photos a listing agent provides, which helps prevent the AI from randomly arranging rooms.)

These features can also help renters visualize a space in their own style, especially if they’re traveling or a partner or housemate can’t join them for a viewing.

Payton Stiewe, president of real estate brokerage Engel & Völkers in San Francisco, Marin County and Burlingame, uses Collov AI to show buyers how a property can look when it’s furnished in their preferred style or even empty, with the Furniture Removal tool.

“When we tour homes with buyers, one of the biggest challenges isn’t the house itself. It’s what’s inside it,” Stiewe explains. “Even when a home is professionally staged, or especially when sellers still have their personal belongings in the space, buyers can struggle to see past someone else’s style.”

Using Collov AI, you can see what your dream home would look like in your style in seconds.

“If they’re having trouble picturing a room, I take a photo and instantly show them what that space would look like in their style,” Stiewe says. “Instead of asking them to imagine it, I show them. That clarity changes everything. They stop second-guessing and start making confident, informed decisions.”

Collov AI built its own diffusion model from the start because, while other AI interior design tools exist, many don’t comply with regulations from the Multiple Listing Service and the National Association of Realtors that prohibit AI-generated photos from altering the structure of a space, Markk Tong, Collov AI’s founding marketing director, says.

I noticed this happening when I was “designing” in ChatGPT. It kept changing the structure of the room — moving windows and doorways and even expanding the space.

“You cannot alter the window, the door or the architecture elements of your original photo,” Tong says. “You can, however, transition interiors and exteriors from night to day, summer to fall, rain to shine, declutter a desk, fill a pool or remove a car from the driveway.”

That’s the goal, anyway. Here’s how it worked in practice.

How to Transform a Space Based on Photos You See in a Property Listing

If you want to try it out, too, go through the Collov AI sign-up steps and pick your plan. Membership ranges from $19 to $127 per month. The AI virtual staging and interior design features are available on the $19/month model, but if you want the AI virtual tour, you’ll need the $79/month tier. There is a free trial available, however.

I tested out the AI Virtual Staging feature. This is the interface:

I perused property listings and picked a house I liked that was well-priced but needed work. I really liked the bones of this house, but its styling was lackluster.

I downloaded six photos of different rooms from the listing to transform in Collov AI.

After I uploaded the first photo, it detected the furniture, which I could manually erase if I didn’t like it.

Next, I selected the room type and my preferred design style from the preset templates. I picked the Midcentury look.

Within seconds, it generated five styles, like this:

In one design, it added a piece of furniture and a little wall behind it in the house’s open archway in an AI-fueled hallucination. I used the chat feature to flag it.

While it removed it, it then added an extra cabinet in the kitchen. So it had already changed the structure of the house.

I tried another image. This time, I picked the Farmhouse design.

Here’s the original photo versus Collov AI’s rendering:

I was surprised to see one version completely change the room’s structure, though — something Collov AI is not supposed to do.

I asked Tong about this. He said the typical causes include input photo constraints, room geometry ambiguity and model stochasticity — aka the inherent randomness of AI tools. Collov AI tries to mitigate this by generating multiple variations so users can choose the most accurate one, along with unlimited free regenerations.

It was a lot of fun seeing spaces instantly redesigned in a range of different styles. While I didn’t use all of Collov AI’s features, it was helpful to visualize what a space might look like in another style, especially since many listing photos are lackluster.

But you do still have to watch out for AI weirdnesses, because sometimes it’ll stick a wall where there isn’t one or change the layout of the room.

Can AI Help with Home-Buying Negotiations?

I also spoke with Cain Cooke, chair of the Real Estate Institute of South Australia (REISA), who is an expert voice on the Industry Advisory Board for the Australian Institute of Business.

He’s seen a major shift in the past 18 months in how buyers are arriving to first conversations with agents far better informed and engaged.

“Buyers are using AI to prepare for negotiation by prompting it to identify comparable sales, understand seller motivation signals, and even script out negotiation approaches before they pick up the phone to an agent,” Cooke says. “The research phase has compressed dramatically, but more than that, the preparation phase has too.”

But he warns buyers may arrive at the table overconfident if they’re relying on an AI-generated strategy they believe shows the full picture — especially if the AI’s research contains errors.

“AI is a great starting point, not a finishing point,” he says.

In the vein of tools like Collov AI, which could eventually be built into realtor websites, Cooke says AI may be better used in the real estate market to help sellers create conversational, intelligent interfaces for live listings instead of stagnant pages like those on Zillow, making it easier for buyers to spot the home that might work best for them.

He predicts we’ll see more automated property valuations, AI rental management and faster settlements.

“On automated valuations, we’re already seeing AI-driven tools move well beyond the more blunt median-price estimates of a few years ago,” Cooke says. “The next generation will layer in hyperlocal variables, school zone changes, infrastructure announcements, micro-suburb sentiment, even the quality of a specific street. Producing assessments that are nuanced with deep local insights.”

For rental management, AI will likely handle lease renewal workflows, maintenance triage, compliance tracking and routine tenant communications with minimal human input.

For settlements, Cooke says we can expect AI-assisted contract preparation, automated title and encumbrance checks, digital verification of conditions and streamlined communication between banks, councils and other stakeholders.

So whether you’re renting or buying, AI can be a helpful tool for visualizing your future home and developing negotiation talking points. Just be mindful of AI’s limitations and work through those before making firm plans.

Read more: Your Next Real Estate Agent Could Be AI. But Should It Be?

Correction, 11:02 a.m. PT: An earlier version of this story contained incorrect information about the app’s outdoor design features.

Tags: AI real estate, virtual staging, home buying technology, Collov AI, AI home design, real estate AI, virtual home tours, AI negotiation tools, property visualization, real estate tech

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