Dubai's Real Estate Platforms Are Fighting a Flood of Fake Property Images, Here's What the Experts Want Done

Duplicate listing images, the same photograph recycled across dozens of properties, sometimes for units that don't exist or have already sold, have become a recognised problem inside Dubai's red-hot real estate market, and the people tasked with policing it are openly debating what a credible solution looks like.

The issue has sharpened this year as transaction volumes remain elevated. The Dubai Land Department recorded more than 180,000 real estate transactions in 2025, sustaining demand for online listings at a pace that property portals struggle to audit manually. That volume creates cover for agents and third-party aggregators to reuse hero images, virtual staging shots and even AI-generated renders across multiple listings simultaneously, sometimes for different neighbourhoods and price brackets.

What Regulators and Industry Bodies Are Pushing For

The Real Estate Regulatory Agency, RERA, the licensing arm operating under the Dubai Land Department on Baniyas Road in Deira, has previously mandated that agents attach their Trakheesi permit number to every listing. The permit system was designed in part to authenticate listings, but experts working in the PropTech space argue it does nothing to verify that the image attached to a listing corresponds to the actual unit being advertised.

Industry voices in the Dubai PropTech community, including firms based in the Dubai International Financial Centre and in hub71-adjacent technology clusters, have called for hash-based image verification, a process that assigns each uploaded photograph a unique digital fingerprint and flags it automatically when the same file appears on a second or third listing. Several regional portals already use reverse-image detection internally, but the system is not standardised across the market and is rarely enforced with consequences for repeat offenders.

Professionals at Bayut and Property Finder, the two dominant portals serving the Dubai market, have both spoken publicly in recent years about the challenge of fraudulent or misleading imagery, though neither has announced a mandatory cross-platform image registry as of this writing. The absence of a shared database means a photograph pulled from a Business Bay tower can reappear on a listing for a Jumeirah Village Circle studio within hours of being posted.

The Practical Fallout, and What Should Happen Next

For buyers and renters, the damage is concrete. Prospective tenants who have arrived at viewings along Sheikh Zayed Road or in the Marina Walk area have described finding properties that bear no resemblance to the images that prompted their inquiry. In a market where a two-bedroom apartment in Dubai Marina can ask AED 140,000 or more per year, the gap between image and reality carries serious financial stakes.

Technology specialists consulted broadly in the sector, though not for the purposes of this article, have pointed to the European Union's Digital Services Act, which came into force for large platforms in 2024, as a benchmark framework worth studying. Under that regulation, major online platforms face legal obligations to audit and remove misleading commercial content at scale. Dubai has no equivalent legislation specific to property image authenticity, though RERA's broader advertising standards do prohibit misleading representations.

The Expo City Dubai district, which has grown into a test bed for smart-city and PropTech pilots since the 2020 event closed, has been cited informally as a potential venue for a sandboxed image-verification trial involving multiple portals. No formal program has been announced.

Practically, agents and buyers operating in the market right now are advised to cross-check listing images using free reverse-image tools before committing to a viewing deposit, and to request a dated Ejari certificate or a developer's handover photo pack when inspecting off-plan or recently completed units. RERA's Dubai REST app allows permit verification in real time, which at minimum confirms whether the listing agent holds a current licence, even if it cannot confirm whether the photograph is genuine.

The pressure to act is building. With the UAE's broader digital-economy ambitions pegged to trust in its online platforms, a property market where fake images circulate freely is a reputational liability that regulators and platform operators alike will eventually be forced to address, on a fixed timetable rather than an open-ended one.