AB 723 and virtual staging: what California now requires

What the law is

Assembly Bill 723 was signed on 10 October 2025 as Chapter 497 of the Statutes of 2025. It adds a single section to the Business and Professions Code, § 10140.8, and it has applied to California listings since 1 January 2026. It is short, and it is worth reading in full; this article summarises it, and is not legal advice.

The duty falls on a real estate broker or salesperson, or a person acting on their behalf, who includes a digitally altered image in an advertisement or other promotional material for the sale of real property. That last group matters: a photographer, a marketing assistant or a staging vendor producing listing images for an agent is acting on the agent's behalf.

What counts as a digitally altered image?

The statute defines it as an image altered with photo-editing software or artificial intelligence to add, remove or change elements of the property. It lists what those elements can be: fixtures, furniture, appliances, flooring, walls, paint colour, hardscape, landscaping, the facade, floor plans, and things outside the property such as utility poles or neighbouring buildings.

It also says what does not count: adjustments to lighting, sharpening, white balance, colour correction, angle, straightening, cropping and exposure — provided they do not change how the property is represented. A well-exposed photograph of an empty room is not altered. The same photograph with a sofa added is.

The two obligations

For every advertisement that includes an altered image, the law asks for two things.

1. A statement that the image has been altered. It has to be reasonably conspicuous and located on or adjacent to the image. A line in the fine print at the bottom of a brochure, pages away from the photo, is unlikely to meet that.
2. A link to the original. A link, URL or QR code to a publicly accessible website that includes the original, unaltered image and clearly identifies it as the original. Publicly accessible means a buyer can open it without an account.

Where the advertisement is on a website the broker or salesperson controls — their own listing site, for example — the statute asks for the unaltered images to be included in the posting itself.

A working checklist

• Keep every original capture, named so it can be matched to its altered version.
• Put the disclosure statement on the image or immediately beside it, in every place the image appears: MLS, portals, brochures, social posts, email.
• Publish the originals somewhere a buyer can reach without signing in, and link to them — or print a QR code — wherever the altered image appears. Vesta does this for you: see below.
• On your own website, show the original alongside the altered image in the listing.
• Check your MLS's rules. Several California MLSs and REALTOR® associations have published their own AB 723 guidance, and an MLS can require more than the statute does.

What Vesta does, and what it does not

Vesta burns a disclosure mark into every render before you see it. It reads "AB-723 · AI VIRTUAL STAGING · DISCLOSED", it sits on the image itself, and no plan can remove it. That covers the statement.

Vesta also publishes the original. Every staged photo gets a public page showing the photo you uploaded, labelled as the original, beside its staged version; no account is needed to open it. Each export carries a QR code to that page, and each listing has a single link to all of its originals, for the MLS remarks or link field.

What Vesta cannot do is put the link in your advertisement. Leave the QR on the exported photo, or paste the listing link beside it, wherever the photo appears. Many MLSs do not allow QR codes inside listing photos; for those, switch the QR off at export and use the listing link.

Beyond what the law asks, every render and every export is fingerprinted and written to an append-only ledger, so you can later show exactly which file Vesta produced. How that record works is covered separately.