297 California listings say their photos were altered. 3 link to the original.
Since January 1, 2026, California has asked for two things on a digitally altered listing photo: a conspicuous statement that it was altered, and a link or QR code to the original. We searched 12 California metro areas on Zillow for listings whose own description admits the first, then checked whether they do the second.
The method, the code, and every row are published below under CC BY 4.0. Individual agent names are not included, by choice. This is a dated observation about public listing pages, not a legal finding about any broker.
1. The result, both ways of reading it
99.0%
Strict reading
294 of 297 offer no publicly reachable URL or QR code to the original image. Only a link or QR counts.
95.3%
Generous reading
283 of 297, crediting the 11 listings that say the unaltered photo sits in the same gallery.
Both numbers are published together on purpose. Picking one is exactly where a careful reader would start pulling the result apart, and the distance between them is the interesting part: it is the set of people who understood the requirement and solved it their own way.
| Route to the original image | Listings | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| A link or QR code to the original image | 3 | Satisfies the second condition on its face |
| Says the original is inside the same listing | 11 | A different route to the same end. Counted separately, not as a failure |
| Original available “on request” | 2 | Not compliance. The statute asks for a public link, not a phone call |
| Nothing beyond the disclosure sentence | 281 | Discloses the alteration, offers no route to the original |
Narrowing to the 268 listings that went up on or after the statute took effect does not move it: 3 of them carry a link or QR code.
2. Three things we did not expect
Compliance exists, and a person typed it by hand
We expected zero. There are 3, and none of them was produced by a tool. Someone pasted a folder link, or arranged a QR code, into a free-text remarks box.
- Link to original images: drive.google.com/drive/folders/1KHoslt…
Sacramento · Wesely & Associates · listing
- Digitally altered images: drive.google.com/drive/project/1Lgq2XX…
Sacramento · Excel Realty Inc. · listing
- Original unaltered photos are available via the QR code provided.Don't miss out call your preferred agent today to schedule your private showing and see the possibilities for yourself!
Bakersfield · Sierra Central Real Estate · listing
“The original is already in this listing” is a real answer
11 listings did not link anywhere. They put the unaltered photo in the gallery next to the staged one and said so. Scoring that as a violation would have been wrong, so it is reported on its own line. Two of them cite the statute directly.
- “Original photos are included.”— Santa Monica · Compass
- “Unaltered photos of the actual condition are included in the listing.”— Sylmar · A to Z Realty Group
- “Original unedited photos are also included in the photo gallery.”— North Hollywood · Coldwell Banker Hallmark
Where a system fills the field, the disclosure appears
8 listings carry the byte-identical caption Digitally Altered on individual photos, across 8 unrelated brokerages. All 8 are in San Diego County. In the other 11 metro areas that exact string appears zero times. Eight competitors did not independently choose the same two words; something upstream of all of them wrote it.
3. What we think it means
Nothing in the listing pipeline produces the artefact the statute asks for. Where compliance shows up, either an individual improvised it in a free-text box, or a system filled a field automatically. The MLS entry form has no field for the original photo's URL, no portal renders one, and no staging tool emits one.
An earlier draft of this claim was stronger and wrong. We had written that there is nowhere to put the link. There is: Zillow has a caption field and it is used, and a Drive link pastes into remarks fine. The accurate version is narrower, and it is the one above.
4. Method
We searched 12 California metro boxes on Zillow for five phrases indicating a listing describes its own photos as altered. That produced 492 candidates. Each was then fetched and confirmed against the agent-written description field only; 195 did not survive that check and were dropped.
Searching raw HTML gives a 60% false positive rate
Zillow ships its own mediaType:VIRTUAL_STAGING block on every listing page, whether or not the agent staged anything. Only the description field the agent wrote counts.
Zillow's own keyword index reads a field we cannot see
Of the 195 rejected candidates, 153 have no staging root anywhere in their public description. Zillow matched them on something not shown to the public, which turns "MLS-only remarks are invisible to us" from a caveat into a measured one.
A fixed phrase list undercounts
Real listings say “virtually stage”, “virtually stages”, “staged virtually”. Substring matching on one phrase misses them, so the classifier is a regex.
“Digitally enhanced” alone does not count
Exposure and white balance are outside what AB 723 addresses. That wording is tracked as its own class and excluded from the numbers above.
Proximity is required, not co-occurrence
“Recent upgrades include … the original …” is not about a photograph. The second condition requires the evidence within 80 characters of the disclosure.
Do not split sentences on periods
The two strongest pieces of evidence in the set are Google Drive URLs. Naive sentence splitting cuts drive.google.com in half and destroys them.
| Metro area | Confirmed listings |
|---|---|
| Los Angeles | 140 |
| San Diego | 61 |
| Fresno | 19 |
| San Jose | 15 |
| Long Beach | 12 |
| Sacramento | 11 |
| Palm Springs | 10 |
| Bakersfield | 9 |
| Riverside | 8 |
| San Francisco | 5 |
| Oakland | 5 |
| Irvine | 2 |
5. What this does not show
These travel with every number above. If you quote the result, please quote these too.
- 1Public portal pages only. The MLS-only remarks field is not visible to us, and a disclosure could be sitting in it.
- 2One portal. The sample is Zillow's keyword index, not the MLS.
- 3Metro boxes are approximate areas, not municipal boundaries.
- 4The absence of a link in remarks is not a legal finding. It is a dated observation, published next to the agent's own disclosure sentence.
- 5The sample is deliberately not random. It contains only listings that admit alteration, and supports no inference about listings that never admitted anything.
- 6Whether a QR code actually resolves cannot be checked from the portal. The listing says it does.
- 7Zillow's own staging feature is not an AB 723 case: the buyer applies it, the published photo is already the original, and the two are compared side by side.
6. Take the data
Free, CC BY 4.0, no signup. If you recompute the figures above and get something different, we want to hear about it.
Suggested citation: QuickStaging, “California AB 723 listing disclosure audit,” 2026-08-12. https://getquickstaging.com/virtual-staging-disclosure/audit
Check your own listing
The same classifier that produced this dataset runs as a free tool. Paste your remarks and it reports which of the two parts are present. It runs in your browser, so unpublished MLS remarks stay on your machine.