Should you use AI to write property descriptions?

Most agencies already do it. In October 2026 The Negotiator reported a survey of 250 estate and letting agents, published by a CRM supplier, in which two thirds said they use AI to write property descriptions, more than for any other job. In the same survey 64% said they worry about AI making mistakes.

Both numbers are right to be high. An AI tool is quick at turning a list of facts into readable paragraphs, which is most of the work of a description, and it saves real time on a busy week of instructions. It is also confident when it is wrong, and it writes the same way for every agent who uses it. The supplier’s own chief executive put it plainly: “It’s the same tool doing the same job for every agent on the high street.”

So our view is:

• use AI for the first draft, written from a sheet of facts you have checked, never from photographs and a guess;
• have someone who has seen the property edit every line, for accuracy first and then for what makes this home different;
• get the seller to agree the details before the listing goes anywhere, your website included;
• keep the facts in the structured fields too (tenure, bedrooms, charges), because that is what the portals’ own AI reads.

It fills gaps with flattery. Ask a tool for a description of a three bedroom semi and it will supply a “sun drenched garden”, a “recently modernised kitchen” or a “sought after location” whether or not anyone has said so. It predicts likely words; it does not know the property. Google’s guidance on generative AI says the same of any AI content: generative models “don’t retrieve facts”, and “it is critical to manually factcheck and review all AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing”.

It sounds like everyone else. In April 2025 a Norfolk agent told The Negotiator that competitors’ AI copy was “bland, lifeless copy riddled with American spellings and robotic corporate speak”, and that no template fits the coast’s one-off houses. Whether or not you agree with the tone, the point about sameness matters, because of who reads your listings besides buyers.

Vendors judge you on it. Rightmove’s guide for sellers choosing an agent tells them to “consider first impressions when looking at an agent’s website, photography and property descriptions”, and to search for the agent on Rightmove to see whether they have sold homes like theirs. A vendor comparing three agents reads your current listings. If yours read like the other two, the description has stopped being a reason to instruct you.

Mistakes now get repeated. In February 2026 Rightmove told agents about its new AI tools for buyers. Ask Rightmove answers questions and compares properties using what agents supply: structured data such as bedrooms, property type, price and tenure, and the listing text. Rightmove says it only reflects condition wording that agents use, such as “blank canvas”. Its AI Keywords search scans “images and text in property listings” for features like sea views. A made up feature or a wrong tenure is no longer one line a buyer might skim past; it is the answer a tool gives them. Rightmove’s advice to agents is to “continue to upload as much structured property information as you are able to”.

There is no special rule for AI written listings, and none is needed. The rules on property descriptions apply to every word, whoever drafted it.

• Accurate and complete. The Property Ombudsman’s code says you must take all reasonable steps to make sure that every statement you make about a property, “whether oral, pictorial or written”, is accurate and not misleading, with no material omissions (paragraph 7i).
• Agreed with the seller. Before marketing starts, the written details must be agreed with the seller “to confirm that the details are accurate”, or marked “draft”, “subject to approval” or similar (paragraph 7j).
• No guesses. “You will be liable if you include anything in the sales particulars which you have reason to doubt is correct” (paragraph 7m). A feature the tool added that nobody checked is exactly that.
• Honest advertising. All advertisements “must be legal, decent, honest and truthful in accordance with the ASA Codes” (paragraph 7n). The ASA told agents in 2018: “don’t exaggerate the features of a property”, and to hold evidence for any claim; one ad it ruled against called a shared drive “private”.
• Consumer law. The CMA’s guidance on unfair commercial practices covers the sale of land and counts deciding whether to view a property as a transactional decision. One of its own examples of false information is a house advertised as having three bedrooms “when in fact it has 2 bedrooms and a box room too small for a bed”. The rules under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 apply to practices from 6 April 2025.

The CMA has also written about AI directly. Its March 2026 guidance on AI agents, which includes AI that runs marketing, says the same rules apply whether people “get information produced by” a person or AI, that “someone with appropriate experience should review any AI-generated marketing campaign regularly”, and that breaking consumer law can mean fines of up to 10% of worldwide turnover. Our guide to whether your website needs a chatbot covers that guidance in more detail.

Photographs are the sharper risk. Tools that remove furniture, brighten a sky or restyle a room are now everywhere, including in Rightmove’s own Style with AI for buyers. The ASA’s advice on imagery says images “should not be altered in a way which exaggerates what the product can do”, and that this applies to filters too. If an edit changes what a buyer would see on the viewing, leave it out.

1. Start from a checked fact sheet. Rooms and measurements from the floorplan, tenure checked against the title, lease length and charges for leaseholds, the EPC rating, what the seller has declared in writing, and what the valuer saw. Mark which facts are confirmed and which are the seller’s word. The tool writes from this sheet and nothing else.
2. Give it your house style. A short brief: UK spelling, no “nestled” or “boasting”, no claims about location, condition or potential that are not on the sheet, and a fixed order (summary, rooms, outside, practical details). Use the same brief for every listing so the voice is yours, not the tool’s.
3. Edit for the one thing a template misses. The person who saw the property adds what makes it different: the view from the landing, the walk to the station, the room the sellers actually lived in. This is what a vendor reading your listings will notice.
4. Check every claim before it goes out. Read the draft against the sheet line by line. Delete anything the sheet does not support. Then send it to the seller to agree, as paragraph 7j requires.
5. Fill in the structured fields too. Tenure, bedrooms, bathrooms, charges and key features in the CRM fields, not only in the prose, so the portals and their AI tools have the facts in the form they read.

The same description usually goes to the portals and to your own website from your CRM. That is fine for Google: its guidance says “some duplicate content on a site is normal and it’s not a violation of Google’s spam policies”, and when it finds the same content in more than one place it picks the version that is “objectively the most complete and useful for search users”. Make that your own listing: every photograph, the floorplan, the EPC, all the material information and a description someone at your agency has written properly, not trimmed.

Two cautions for the website itself. Do not use AI to produce pages in bulk around the listings, such as an area page for every street; Google says generating many pages without adding value “may violate” its policy on scaled content abuse, and our guide to whether your website needs a blog explains what to write instead. And make sure your property pages show the details your CRM sends, structured fields included, rather than only a block of text.

A website where buyers and vendors find the fullest version of every listing is what we build: each bespoke estate agent website has its property search fed by your CRM, for one agency per patch. The pricing page sets out what it costs.

• The Negotiator: Agents are using AI for listings but rarely to improve sales (16 October 2026)
• The Negotiator: Agent slams competitors who use AI to write property descriptions (7 April 2025)
• Rightmove: How to choose the right estate agent
• Rightmove Hub: Latest AI innovations (12 February 2026)
• The Property Ombudsman: Code of Practice for Residential Estate Agents (England, Wales and Northern Ireland)
• CMA (GOV.UK): Unfair commercial practices, CMA207 (updated 18 November 2025)
• CMA (GOV.UK): Complying with consumer law when using AI agents (9 March 2026)
• ASA: Home truths for estate agents, ensure your marketing complies with the CAP Code (18 July 2018)
• ASA: A picture says a thousand words, avoiding misleading imagery in ads (11 September 2025)
• Google Search Central: Google Search's guidance on using generative AI content on your website (updated 1 October 2026)
• Google Search Central: What is canonicalization (updated 20 August 2026)

More guides for agency owners are on the guides page.