Horror ‘Demon’ Appears in DC Real Estate Listing Photo

Matt Growcoot
A woman in a brown dress is humorously leaning through a bathroom mirror, reaching for a bowl of fruit on the counter. The bathroom is modern with a bathtub, toilet, and plants as decor.
The bizarre and terrifying figure appeared unexplained in a realtor’s photo of a basement apartment in D.C.

Real estate photos are meant to attract renters and buyers, but AI-generated images are misleading people and making horrific errors. Case in point: a Washington, D.C. listing featured a “demon” climbing out of a bathroom toilet.

Futurism reports that a Redditor in D.C. scrolling through listings stumbled across the disturbing image that was featured on apartments.com and Redfin. “For just $1,800 a month you can have your own bathroom demon,” the Redditor writes.

The listing has since been pulled from apartments.com and the offending image has now been removed from Redfin. But the Wayback Machine saved a screenshot of the listing that featured a ‘Bright MLS’ watermark.

There is no explanation as to how the strange image came to be but when it was cross-posted to r/weird another user shared a photo they had found on another listing that also shows some kind of mangled human form on top of a toilet. It’s remarkable that these obvious errors weren’t spotted before publishing.

Contemporary bathroom with gray tile walls, white bathtub with beige shower curtain, white toilet topped with a doll, and a framed wall picture, creating a modern and relaxing atmosphere.
Another Redditor shared their own horror realtor photo they’d spotted elsewhere.

As PetaPixel reported last year, house hunters have begun to notice that real estate listings increasingly contain AI images and are calling them out for being misleading. There’s even a term for it: ‘housefishing’.

A recent report from The Atlantic revealed that in a survey of realtors, 70 percent of them admitted to using AI.

The driving force behind all of this is cost. “Why would I send my photos of an empty room to a virtual stager, have them spend four days and send it back to me at a charge of 500 bucks when I can just do it in ChatGPT for free in 45 seconds?” realtor Jason Haber told Wired last year. “We’ve done virtual renderings for 20 years, so the fact that you can just do it now on AI, there was a whole cottage industry of virtual renderings and those people are now looking for a new job.”

There are rules in place for real estate listings: the National Association of Realtors specifically prohibits the use of misleading images. But as with most areas, the law hasn’t caught up to AI yet.

Of course all of this is bad news for real estate photographers.

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