Istanbul Races to Purge Duplicate Property Images From Its Listings — and Lags Behind Rivals Doing It Faster

Istanbul's real estate portals are carrying tens of thousands of duplicate and recycled property photographs — the same water-stained bathroom appearing on five different listings, the same Bosphorus-view shot reused across a dozen apartments from Beşiktaş to Sarıyer — and the technology infrastructure to fix that problem is arriving later here than in comparable markets abroad.

The issue matters more now than it did two years ago. Turkey's property market absorbed a historic shock after the February 2023 Kahramanmaraş earthquakes, which pushed hundreds of thousands of displaced families toward Istanbul, driving rental prices in districts like Kadıköy and Fatih to levels that, according to Endeksa's quarterly tracking data, roughly tripled between early 2022 and late 2025. In a market moving that fast, misleading or recycled listing images are not a cosmetic annoyance — they waste the time of families making urgent housing decisions and give unscrupulous landlords cover to advertise properties that no longer exist or no longer look anything like the photograph.

What Istanbul's platforms are — and aren't — doing

Turkey's two dominant property portals, Sahibinden and Hepsiemlak, both operate Istanbul-specific moderation teams. Sahibinden, headquartered on Büyükdere Caddesi in Levent, has publicly described using hash-based image matching to flag identical uploads — a baseline technology that catches exact pixel copies but misses cropped, recoloured, or slightly reframed duplicates. Hepsiemlak has invested in AI-assisted listing verification, though the scope of that rollout in Istanbul specifically has not been made public. Neither company provided figures on the volume of flagged duplicates removed from Istanbul listings in the past 12 months. Requests for comment sent to both companies this week received no response before publication.

The Istanbul Chamber of Commerce's real estate working group has flagged duplicate imagery as part of a broader digital standards agenda it began advancing in early 2025, but the group has no regulatory authority to compel platforms to adopt specific detection thresholds. The Turkish Competition Authority, which does have enforcement reach, has not opened any public proceeding on the matter as of this writing.

How the competition compares

The contrast with Dubai and Berlin is instructive. The Dubai Land Department mandated in 2023 that all listings on platforms operating under its oversight must use verified, date-stamped photographs submitted through its Trakheesi permit system — effectively making duplicate images a compliance problem, not just a quality problem. Berlin's ImmoScout24, which dominates the German market, introduced perceptual hashing combined with a neural network layer in 2024 and, according to figures the company published in a March 2025 transparency report, removed more than 340,000 duplicate image sets from its platform in that year alone.

Istanbul's rental market is arguably larger and more liquid than Berlin's in terms of monthly listing turnover, particularly in high-demand corridors like the D-100 highway belt through Maltepe and Ümraniye, where Syrian refugee families and domestic migrants from the earthquake zone compete for the same mid-range stock. The volume of listings created and abandoned on Istanbul portals each month creates fertile conditions for image recycling, particularly among individual landlords who manage their own listings without agency oversight.

Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's smart city directorate, operating under Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu's office, has piloted a housing data transparency initiative called BEPER — Büyükşehir Emlak ve Planlama Erişim Rehberi — that aims to cross-reference municipal building records with portal listings. As of June 2026, BEPER covers roughly 14 districts and is not yet integrated with any of the major commercial property portals.

For renters and buyers navigating the market now, the practical advice is straightforward: use reverse image search on any listing photograph before arranging a viewing, check whether the Tapu ve Kadastro Genel Müdürlüğü (land registry) parcel number appears on the listing, and treat any Bosphorus-view photograph on a property advertised at below-market rates in Üsküdar or Beykoz with serious scepticism. The technology to make that burden unnecessary exists. The regulatory pressure to deploy it at scale in Istanbul has not yet arrived.