Istanbul Real Estate Portals Tackle Epidemic of Duplicate Property Photos

Walk into any real estate office on Bağcılar Caddesi or scroll through the listings on Sahibinden.com at midnight and you will find the same apartment photographed from the same angle, listed at three different prices by three different agents, sometimes on the same street in Kadıköy. The photograph is identical. The apartment may not exist at all. This is the duplicate image problem that has quietly undermined Istanbul's property market for the better part of a decade, and pressure is finally building on both portals and regulators to fix it.

The issue matters right now because the stakes have never been higher. Turkish housing prices rose more than 68 percent in nominal terms between January 2024 and April 2026, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute, TÜİK. With the lira still under pressure and mortgage rates sitting above 40 percent at most state banks including Halkbank, buyers are doing more of their research online before committing to in-person visits. A market flooded with recycled images and ghost listings wastes their time at best and defrauds them at worst.

How the Duplication Problem Took Root

The origins trace back to roughly 2016 and 2017, when Turkey's two dominant portals, Sahibinden and Hürriyet Emlak, began aggressively expanding their listing bases to compete for advertising revenue from agencies. The business model rewarded volume. Agents learned quickly that reposting a popular listing with fresh photos lifted their search rankings, even when the underlying property had already sold or never been available at the advertised price. By 2019, a study by Istanbul Technical University's urban planning faculty estimated that as many as 23 percent of active listings on major Turkish portals contained images that appeared in at least one other concurrent listing.

The problem compounded after the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes triggered a secondary migration wave into Istanbul. Hundreds of thousands of displaced families began searching for rentals in districts like Esenyurt and Sultangazi, where average monthly rents for a two-bedroom flat climbed from roughly 8,000 lira in early 2023 to over 22,000 lira by mid-2025. Unscrupulous agents exploited the desperation, reposting images of already-rented units to generate inquiry calls, then steering callers toward pricier alternatives. Consumer complaints filed with the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce, ITSO, spiked 34 percent in the 12 months to December 2024 compared with the prior year.

Portals and Regulators Begin to Respond

The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality under Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu launched a pilot housing transparency registry in the Üsküdar district in March 2025, requiring agents to attach a municipal reference number to each listing. The system was meant to make duplicate postings traceable. Uptake was slow, fewer than 40 percent of Üsküdar-based agencies had registered by December 2025, but the municipality expanded the scheme to Beşiktaş and Şişli in February 2026.

On the technology side, Sahibinden announced in October 2025 that it had deployed a reverse-image hashing system developed with a Boğaziçi University engineering team, designed to flag photographs that appear in more than two simultaneous active listings. The portal said the tool removed approximately 190,000 duplicate listings in its first three months of operation. Hürriyet Emlak has not disclosed comparable figures.

The national regulator, TCMB's financial consumer protection directorate, is drafting rules that would impose fines of up to 50,000 lira per duplicate listing on agencies that repeatedly offend. A consultation deadline of September 1, 2026 has been set, with final rules expected before the end of the year.

For buyers and renters navigating the market today, the practical advice from housing lawyers at the Istanbul Bar Association's consumer rights desk on Ankara Caddesi in Cağaloğlu is straightforward: cross-reference any listing image using a standard reverse-image search before travelling to a viewing, ask the agent for the municipal reference number where one exists, and report suspicious listings directly to ITSO's online portal, which now accepts complaints in under five minutes. The infrastructure to clean this market up exists. The question is how fast it reaches every district beyond the pilot zones.