For about two years, listing photos have been getting quietly better than the homes they represent. Not brighter or better composed, which is just good photography, but actually different. Furniture generated into an empty room. A cracked driveway smoothed over. A power line removed from the sky. A brown July lawn turned a convincing green. The tools got cheap and good at roughly the same moment, and the industry adopted them faster than it agreed on any rules.
California drew the line on January 1, 2026. Assembly Bill 723 added Section 10140.8 to the Business and Professions Code, and the short version is this: if a broker or salesperson uses a digitally altered image in an advertisement or promotional piece, that image has to carry a disclosure statement on it or immediately next to it, plus a link, URL, or QR code that takes you to the original unaltered photo. This is general information rather than legal advice, and if you need the statute applied to a specific listing you should ask a real estate attorney. But the mechanism is worth understanding whether you are selling a home or shopping for one.
What counts as altered, and what does not
The distinction the law draws is between making a photograph look good and making a property look like something it is not. Ordinary photographic processing is not the target. Adjusting brightness, contrast, and color, cropping the frame, and correcting the lens distortion that makes straight walls look curved are all normal parts of producing a usable image, and they do not change the home.
What does trigger the disclosure is changing the property itself in the image. Broadly, that means adding, removing, or altering elements of the home or the lot:
- Virtual staging that generates furniture, rugs, or art into a room that is actually empty.
- Removing or adding fixtures and appliances, or swapping the ones that are there for nicer versions.
- Changing flooring, wall color, countertops, or cabinetry so the finish in the photo is not the finish in the house.
- Editing the landscaping, greening a dormant lawn, or deleting things from the yard or the view.
- Altering exterior finishes, roof condition, or the sky and surroundings in a way that changes what the property looks like in real life.
The enforcement side is not decorative. California treats willful violations of the real estate licensing law as a misdemeanor, which puts this well past the category of an MLS house rule. That is a meaningful change in posture. Before AB 723, undisclosed alterations were mostly a matter of individual MLS policy and professional judgment. Now there is a statute with the license attached to it.
The rule is not that you cannot enhance a photo. The rule is that a buyer gets to see what you started with.
Why I think this is good for sellers, not a burden on them
My honest read is that AB 723 protects good sellers from a race they were losing. If the listing three streets over is running AI-perfected photos and yours are accurate, yours look worse in the search results through no fault of your home. The buyer does not know they are comparing an honest photo to an invented one. They just know which thumbnail they clicked. A disclosure rule takes that asymmetry away.
It also protects the part of a sale that actually costs money when it goes wrong: the showing. A buyer who arrives at a home expecting the photographed version and finds something different does not quietly adjust their expectations. They feel misled, and that feeling attaches to the property. I would much rather have ten buyers walk in with accurate expectations than thirty walk in with inflated ones, because the second group leaves, and some of them tell their agent why. Traffic is not the goal. Offers are the goal, and offers come from buyers whose expectations survive contact with the house.
Virtual staging specifically remains a legitimate and useful tool, and I want to be clear that the law did not ban it. An empty house photographs badly and shows badly, and giving a buyer a sense of scale and furniture placement is a real service. The law asks you to label it and provide the unfurnished original. In practice that is a caption and a link. If a listing cannot survive the buyer seeing the empty room, the problem was never the staging.
What this means if you are buying
You now have a right you should actually use. When a listing carries an alteration disclosure, follow the link and look at the original. Do it before you spend a Saturday driving to it, and do it especially carefully on any photo that made you want the house. The gap between the altered image and the original is information. Sometimes the gap is nothing, just furniture in an empty room. Sometimes the gap tells you the yard needs work, the kitchen is older than it looked, or the view has something in it that got edited out.
Also notice the absence of a disclosure. If a listing shows a perfectly staged, perfectly lit, perfectly landscaped property with no disclosure anywhere, that is either an honest set of photos of a genuinely sharp home, or someone is out of compliance. Either way it is worth a question to your agent. And none of this replaces the inspection contingency. Photographs, honest or otherwise, are marketing. The inspection report is where you learn what the house actually is.
How I handle photography on my own listings
My position has not changed because the law changed. I shoot properties as they are, and I put the work into the house before the camera shows up rather than into the file afterward. That means real preparation: decluttering, cleaning, repairing the obvious, physical staging when the home is empty and the numbers support it, and shooting at a time of day that flatters the light the house actually gets. Good photography is not deception. It is showing a real property at its best hour instead of its worst.
If a listing of mine uses virtual staging, it gets labeled and the original goes with it. That costs me nothing and buys the buyer's trust, which is the only currency that matters when you are asking someone to write the largest check of their life. You can look at how my current and recent listings are presented on the properties page and judge for yourself.
If you are getting ready to sell and you want to talk through how your home should be prepared and presented before anyone photographs it, that is exactly the ground a pre-listing strategy review covers. And if you want to know what your home is realistically worth before you plan any of it, start with a home value estimate and then reach out so we can put real numbers to it.
Thinking about selling? Request a pre-listing strategy review.