How Istanbul's Building Stock Ended Up Full of the Same Facade: The Story Behind the Duplicate Image Problem

Istanbul's property registry has a problem it did not fully acknowledge until recently: thousands of buildings across the city share identical photographs in their official digital files. The same image of a five-storey apartment block in Bağcılar appears attached to addresses in Gaziosmanpaşa. A single rooftop shot of a Kadıköy building turns up dozens of times across the Asian-side district rolls. The Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality's geographic information directorate has been working since at least late 2024 to audit and replace these duplicate images, but the scale of the task reflects how the situation developed in the first place.

The timing matters now because the post-2023 earthquake urgency has not faded. After the Kahramanmaraş disaster killed more than 50,000 people across southern Turkey in February 2023, national authorities accelerated building-inspection programmes across major cities. Accurate photographic records are a baseline requirement for any structural assessment. When an inspector in Fatih or Esenyurt pulls up a building file and finds a stock image shared by 40 other addresses, the practical value of that record collapses.

A Rush to Digitise, a Failure to Verify

The roots of the problem go back to the mid-2000s, when successive administrations — both at the metropolitan level and within the 39 constituent district municipalities — pushed hard to move paper-based cadastral and zoning records onto digital platforms. The programme was accelerated again around 2012 when the Justice and Development Party government pushed through a major municipal restructuring law that expanded Istanbul's administrative boundaries significantly, absorbing dozens of previously independent towns. That expansion meant millions of new parcel records needed photographs, and field teams were simply not large enough to photograph every structure individually in the time allotted.

The result was predictable. Contractors filling data entry quotas pulled images from existing records and attached them to new entries. In some cases, satellite or aerial images licensed from a single provider were cropped and redistributed across hundreds of parcels in newly absorbed districts like Silivri, Çatalca, and Arnavutköy. The Istanbul Land Registry and Cadastre Directorate, which operates under the national Tapu ve Kadastro Genel Müdürlüğü, acknowledged the broader data-quality challenge in a 2022 internal review, though the specific scale of the duplicate-image issue has not been made public in full.

District-level effects have been documented most clearly in Esenyurt and Bağcılar, two of the most densely built municipalities in Europe. Esenyurt alone added more than 300,000 residents between 2010 and 2020, according to Turkish Statistical Institute figures, with construction outrunning administrative capacity at nearly every stage. The Syrian refugee community, heavily concentrated in neighbourhoods such as Esenyurt's Pınar Mahallesi, has found property documentation disputes particularly difficult to resolve when building records are visually indistinguishable from one another.

What the Audit Looks Like on the Ground

Field teams contracted through the İBB's directorate of urban transformation have been re-photographing structures block by block in affected areas since the second quarter of 2025. The work is methodical and slow. In Kadıköy, the process moved street by street through Moda and Caferağa neighbourhoods over several months last autumn. In Bağcılar, teams were still working through grid sections of Fevzi Çakmak Mahallesi as recently as spring 2026, according to municipal procurement records published on the Public Procurement Authority's e-ihaledirect platform.

The replacement images are geotagged and timestamped, a standard the original digitisation programme never required. Each new photograph is cross-referenced against the address data in TAKBIS, the national land registry information system, before upload. That additional verification step is precisely what was skipped during the fast-digitisation era.

For property owners, the practical advice from district registry offices has been consistent: if you are preparing documentation for a sale, a mortgage application, or a structural survey referral, request a fresh records extract rather than relying on any copy made before mid-2025. In a city where the lira's sustained weakness has pushed average Istanbul apartment prices above 10 million lira in many central districts, the cost of a contested or delayed transaction from a bad image record is not trivial. The audit is still running. Completion across all 39 districts has no publicly confirmed deadline.