PSA: As a homebuyer, the free version of Google's AI is surprisingly good for visualizing interior/exterior changes to a house you're considering.
I heard from a coworker a while back that Gemini was surprisingly good at photo editing. I've used it a few times over the past few months while house shopping to visualize changes to houses we were considering but that would need some changes to fit what we like. I wanted to share the results in case this is helpful to others.
Notes:
- This is the free version of Gemini (gemini.google.com)
- The houses shown in the examples already sold. I'm not trying to stealth market anything.
Images in the examples
This link has each of the images outlined below: https://imgur.com/a/xRqHAPL
Example 1: House Needing More Curb Appeal
There was a house my wife and I found intriguing except for its low curb appeal (subjective, obviously).
I took a Street View screenshot and uploaded it. That's image 1.
I told it: "Add some decorative trim to the front of the house around the garage door and windows. Change the color scheme to mostly white with black trim."
That led to image 2, which wasn't really true to the original. It completely changed the window design. So I went back with "I like the black and white. But keep the original window shape, and just add black trim around the windows. Also keep the black trim around the garage door."
That led to Image 3, which was pretty much what I was looking for. It's not perfect, and it does still slightly change the window shape, but it's enough to get a really good idea of what the hosue would look like with that change. I could show image 3 to a contractor and say "That's what I want" and it would be very straightforward to design around it.
I tried some other color combinations that might go better with the terra cotta tile roof.
I also tried showing it a photo of the rest of the front of the house behind the wall/greenery to see if it could show what it would look like if you took out the wall and did the rest of the house in the same color scheme. It couldn't pull that off, but I didn't expect it to. It might work with the right photos, but there wasn't one on Zillow with the rest of the front of the house from the same angle.
Example 2: Kitchen Update
For a different house we considered, I thought the kitchen looked pretty dated, so I tried the same thing. I took a Redfin/Zillow photo of the kitchen (Image 4) and asked it to replace the tile counters with quartz in a similar color.
The first time it did that but also put up a weird tile backsplash I didn't like. Second attempt worked.
Then I asked it to remove the soffit (?) light and replace with can lights. It put in way too many can lights, but still did a good job of showing it without the soffit. Finished product was image 5.
Example 3: Roofing Change
Another house had some roofing issues. Not sure it would really need replacement, but I was curious what it would look like. I tried a couple different versions. See images 6-10.
Takeaways
Gemini is far from perfect and sometimes takes a little fine-tuning. But for a completely free product, I was shocked at how well it did for visualizing changes we might want to make to a house.
I got some wonky results in some of the attempts. When I asked it to create images showing a different house in 3 different color schemes, it took the starting image, divided into thirds, and did each third in a different color scheme. Another time I asked it to do a certain paint scheme for a house and got that back. Then I told it to try a black and white color scheme with white as the base and black as the trim. It spit back the same image in black and white.
I found that it did better if I went back to the desired starting point and had it redo things from there if I didn't like a result, rather than making sequential changes to its product. That got weird sometimes.
Hope some of this is helpful to others.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/RealEstate/comments/1ucmfdd/psa_as_a_homebuyer_the_free_version_of_googles_ai/
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