Istanbul Residents Speak Out as Duplicate Property Images Distort the City's Housing Market

A family in Üsküdar books three apartment viewings in one week. All three properties look identical in the listing photos. Two turn out to be different flats entirely; one does not exist at the address given. This is not an isolated story. Across Istanbul, tenants and prospective buyers say the proliferation of duplicate and replacement images on property platforms has become a serious practical problem at the worst possible moment — as rental prices remain near historic highs following years of lira-driven inflation.

The timing matters. Istanbul's housing market has been under acute pressure since at least 2022, when annual rent increases in some central districts climbed above 100 percent. The Turkish lira's sustained weakness pushed landlords to reprice aggressively, squeezing both Turkish tenants and the city's large Syrian refugee community. Against that backdrop, accurate visual information about a property is not a cosmetic concern. For renters who cannot afford to make mistakes, a misleading listing photograph translates directly into wasted transport costs, lost working hours, and in the worst cases, deposit money paid on a flat that looked nothing like what was advertised.

What Residents Are Experiencing on the Ground

Conversations with residents across multiple districts paint a consistent picture. In Kadıköy's Moda neighbourhood, where a standard one-bedroom flat was advertising for between 18,000 and 25,000 lira per month as of spring 2026, several people described finding the same stock interior photograph attached to multiple separate listings at different addresses. The image — a bright living room with herringbone parquet, typically — appeared on platforms including Sahibinden.com and Emlakjet for properties on streets as far apart as Bahariye Caddesi and Söğütlüçeşme.

The issue is not limited to the rental tier. In Beyoğlu, where boutique apartments near İstiklal Caddesi attract both long-term residents and short-term Airbnb-style operators, buyers working with mid-sized real estate agencies reported that professional photographs taken for one property were being repurposed wholesale when a similar unit in the same building came to market. The result: a buyer who visited a flat in a Cihangir building on Akarsu Caddesi in May 2026 believed they were viewing the same property they had seen photographed online, only to find the layout, floor level, and condition were materially different.

The Istanbul Chamber of Real Estate Agents — Gayrimenkul Danışmanları Odası — has acknowledged the image duplication problem in sector discussions, though the body has not published a specific enforcement timeline as of this writing. Turkey's Housing Development Administration, TOKI, operates separately in the new-build segment and is less directly affected. The platforms themselves, under Turkish consumer protection legislation updated in 2023, carry obligations around accurate listing content, but enforcement at the level of individual photograph authenticity remains limited.

A Market With Little Room for Error

The people hit hardest tend to be those with the fewest options. Members of Istanbul's Syrian refugee community, concentrated in districts like Bağcılar and Esenyurt on the European side, frequently described relying on listing photographs when language barriers made direct landlord communication difficult. Several community support workers operating through the Istanbul branch of the Association for Solidarity with Asylum Seekers and Migrants — SGDD-ASAM — have raised the image accuracy issue as part of broader housing advocacy work in 2026, though the organisation has not published formal data on the scale of the problem.

For Turkish renters navigating the market alone, one practical line of defence has emerged: cross-referencing listing images against Google Street View for the exterior and requesting a live video call walkthrough before any in-person visit. Several residents in Şişli said this had become standard practice. Property technology startups including Emlak Listesi and Coşkun Gayrimenkul have begun offering verified-photo tags on premium listings, typically at an additional fee to the landlord of around 500 to 800 lira per listing.

What happens next depends partly on whether Sahibinden.com and its competitors move toward mandatory image-verification tools — a step the platforms have discussed publicly but not committed to by mid-2026. The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, under Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu's administration, has signalled interest in a broader housing transparency initiative, though no programme with specific image-verification components has been formally announced. Until then, the burden falls where it almost always does in this market: on the renter, walking through a door that may look nothing like the photograph that brought them there.