For Realtors · September 8, 2026 · 8 min read
Last month I walked a listing appointment in Harford County. Nice split-foyer, sellers had owned it twenty years. They pulled up Zillow on their phone and said, "It says 2,400 square feet."
The tax record said 2,100.
I measured it at 1,987.
Guess which number they wanted in the MLS?
This is the conversation we're all having right now, and HousingWire reports that new tech—LiDAR measurements, 3D tours, even AI guardrails—might finally give us backup when clients insist their house is bigger than physics allows. But the same article makes it clear that no amount of technology will save an agent from their own bad judgment or a seller who wants to "round up" square footage the way you round up your age at a bar.
The stakes are real. Misrepresentation claims are expensive. A buyer who discovers your 2,400-square-foot listing is actually 300 feet smaller can walk, sue, or both. And in Maryland, where we now have mandatory buyer-agency agreements as of this past September 17, everyone's lawyering up faster than usual anyway.
So let's talk about what's actually changing, what won't, and what it means if you're listing a home in Baltimore County, Cecil, Harford, Anne Arundel, or anywhere else I'm licensed.
LiDAR—Light Detection and Ranging, if you want to impress someone at a closing table—uses lasers to measure distances down to fractions of an inch. Contractors use it. Surveyors use it. And now listing agents can use it, either with a dedicated scanner or, increasingly, through apps that tap into the LiDAR sensors already baked into newer iPhones.
Why does this matter?
Because when a buyer's appraiser shows up and measures your listing at 150 square feet less than you advertised, you're not arguing about whose tape measure was more honest. You're arguing about whether your E&O insurance covers the shortfall or whether your seller is going to sue you first.
LiDAR takes the argument off the table. The HousingWire piece quotes industry sources saying the tech creates a defensible record. You measured it. You've got a scan. The data doesn't lie, and more importantly, it doesn't forget which wall you skipped because the dog was barking and you were late for another appointment.
I've started using it on every listing in Harford and Baltimore County where the tax record and the seller's memory don't match. It adds maybe twenty minutes to my prep work. It's saved me twice already.
Here's the other half of the story, and it's messier.
AI editing tools can now remove power lines, add blue skies, swap out ugly furniture, and generally make a 1980s rancher look like it wandered out of a Magnolia catalog. Some of this is harmless. Some of it is fraud. The line between the two is thinner than most agents think.
HousingWire's article warns that AI-edited photos can cross into misrepresentation fast—especially if you remove structural flaws, add square footage visually, or imply features that don't exist. Maryland doesn't have specific AI-photo disclosure laws yet, but we do have fraud statutes, and "the algorithm did it" is not a defense that's going to fly in front of the Maryland Real Estate Commission.
My rule: if the edit changes a fact, don't do it. Brighten a dark kitchen? Fine. Erase the neighbor's above-ground pool that's technically on their property but visually in your shot? Also fine. Digitally expand a bedroom or remove a load-bearing wall? Absolutely not.
The smarter listing platforms are starting to flag AI edits automatically, and some are requiring disclosure. That's good. Because the first agent in Baltimore County who gets sued because a buyer thought the house came with a back deck that only existed in Photoshop is going to make the evening news, and the rest of us will spend six months explaining that we don't do that.
If you're selling a house anywhere from Cecil County down to Charles County, or across the line into York or Lancaster in Pennsylvania, here's what you need to know: your agent's tools are getting better, but that doesn't mean your house is magically bigger or prettier than it is.
Good agents have always measured carefully. Now we've got lasers.
Good agents have always taken honest photos. Now we've got AI that can lie faster than we can catch it, so the honest ones are slowing down and double-checking everything.
If your Realtor shows up with a tape measure and a phone, that's fine. If they show up with a LiDAR scanner and a checklist, that's better. If they show up and immediately start talking about how they can "enhance" your listing photos to "maximize appeal" without explaining exactly what that means, you should ask questions. Loudly.
I've been in education for twenty years before I ever sold a house. I still teach. And the first thing I teach sellers is this: the truth is always easier to defend than a good story.
Technology can measure your house. It can't make your agent honest.
It can document what your property actually looks like. It can't force your agent to disclose the leak in the basement or the settlement crack behind the couch.
And it definitely can't talk a seller out of a bad idea when they're convinced that "everyone does it" or "it's just marketing."
I've had sellers ask me to list their house as four bedrooms when one of the "bedrooms" was a finished closet with no window. I've had sellers hand me photos from 2019—before the kitchen fire—and suggest we use those instead of current ones. I've had sellers ask if we could "just skip" the part where we mention the oil tank in the backyard.
The answer is always no. And LiDAR doesn't change that.
What it does do is give me a defensible record when the tax card says one thing, the seller remembers another, and the buyer's appraiser is about to make it everyone's problem. That's worth the extra twenty minutes.
While we're talking tech, let's not ignore the market that tech is serving.
Mortgage rates hit 6.71% last week, according to Freddie Mac's latest survey. That's the highest we've seen in 2026, and it's happening right as new listings hit a four-year high. I wrote about that mismatch last week—more inventory, fewer buyers, and a whole lot of sellers wondering why their house isn't moving.
Accurate listings matter more in a slow market. When buyers have choices, they're pickier. When they're pickier, they're more likely to walk over a square-footage discrepancy or a photo that doesn't match reality.
And when rates are high, the buyers who are still in the market are serious. They've done the math. They know what they can afford. They're not going to shrug off a few hundred missing square feet, because those square feet cost real money at 6.71%.
This is especially true in the Baltimore-Washington corridor, where we've got price points all over the map. A missing 200 square feet in a $300,000 rancher in Harford County? That's a different conversation than a missing 200 square feet in a $750,000 Colonial in Howard County. But both conversations end the same way: with the agent explaining why the listing was wrong and the seller wondering if they need a lawyer.
I've always measured. Now I'm scanning.
I've always taken my own photos or hired a pro who knows what "accurate" means. Now I'm adding metadata notes to every edited image so we've got a record of what changed and why.
And I'm having a longer conversation at the listing appointment about what we're allowed to say, what we're required to say, and what we're absolutely not going to say even if Zillow's algorithm thinks the house is bigger than it is.
None of this makes me faster. Some of it makes me slower. But I spent two decades teaching high schoolers that shortcuts catch up with you, and I'm not about to unlearn that lesson now that I'm selling houses in Maryland.
If you're looking to sell your home in Harford County, Baltimore County, or anywhere else in my coverage area, you're going to get a listing that matches reality. You're going to get photos that look like your house, not someone else's fantasy. And you're going to get square footage we can defend in front of an appraiser, a buyer's agent, and if necessary, a judge.
That's not new tech. That's old-fashioned honesty. The tech just makes it easier to prove.
The HousingWire article talks about platforms that are automating compliance checks—flagging missing disclosures, catching measurement errors, even warning agents when a listing description might trigger a fair-housing complaint. That's all good. But automation only works if the human using it cares about accuracy in the first place.
I care. If you're hiring a Maryland Realtor who doesn't, no amount of LiDAR is going to save you.
If you've got questions about what your house actually measures, what your listing photos should look like, or what the current market looks like for sellers in Cecil, Harford, Baltimore, or Anne Arundel County, let's talk. I'll bring the laser. You bring the truth. We'll figure out the rest.
Katrina Kirton Sherrod, REALTOR® · Samson Properties · Licensed in MD, DC, PA & DE · 443-616-9770 · Katrina@kkstherealtor.com
“The best time to buy a home was five years ago. The second best time is after we talk.” — Every honest realtor, eventually