Dubai Moves to Stamp Out Duplicate Property Listings Before They Poison the Market

Dubai's real estate market, which recorded more than 180,000 transactions in 2025 according to the Dubai Land Department, is confronting a problem that has shadowed property portals for years: duplicate and misrepresented listing images that mislead buyers, inflate perceived inventory, and erode trust in an already competitive market. The Dubai Real Estate Regulatory Agency, known as RERA, has tightened its verified-listing requirements for brokers operating on platforms including Bayut and Property Finder, requiring agents to submit a Trakheesi permit number — a unique code tied to each individual property advertisement — before any listing goes live.

The timing matters. Dubai's off-plan sector is absorbing record capital inflows, with buyers from Eastern Europe, South Asia, and increasingly China committing deposits on units they may never physically inspect before handover. When a listing carries photographs recycled from a completed tower in Business Bay to sell a shell in a half-built tower in Dubai South, the consequences are not abstract: buyers sign sale and purchase agreements based on a visual reality that does not exist. Consumer complaints related to misrepresented properties filed with RERA increased through 2024 and into 2025, according to the agency's published annual report, though the department has not broken out a standalone figure specifically for image duplication.

What Dubai Is Doing Differently

The Trakheesi system, which RERA rolled out progressively from 2013 onward, is now the central mechanism for policing duplicate content. Each permit is property-specific and expires after 90 days, forcing agents to refresh listings rather than recycle them indefinitely. Property Finder introduced its own image-verification layer in 2023, using automated hash-matching technology to flag photographs that appear across more than one active permit. Bayut, headquartered in Dubai Internet City, runs a similar system and has publicly stated it delists non-compliant agents — though the platforms do not publish granular enforcement data.

The picture looks different in comparable markets. Singapore's Urban Redevelopment Authority mandates that listings on portals like PropertyGuru carry a unique transaction reference, but enforcement of image duplication specifically is left largely to the platforms themselves. In London, where Rightmove and Zoopla dominate, there is no equivalent of Trakheesi; the National Trading Standards Estate and Letting Agency Team sets conduct rules but does not operate a permit-level photo-verification system. Hong Kong's Estate Agents Authority licenses brokers individually but does not require per-listing permits. By that measure, Dubai's infrastructure is more granular than most comparable financial hubs — the gap is in auditing whether the rules are actually working on the ground.

The Problem That Persists in the Portals

Walk along Sheikh Zayed Road on any given Friday and you will find a broker's office window plastered with printed listings that bear photographs clearly shot in a different tower, a different district, sometimes a different country. The digital portals are cleaner, but not clean. Researchers at proptech firm Habibi.ai, based in the Dubai Internet City free zone, published a snapshot analysis in early 2025 suggesting that roughly one in eight active listings on major UAE portals carried at least one photograph that also appeared in a separate, concurrent listing under a different permit. The firm used perceptual hashing and metadata comparison across a sample of approximately 40,000 live advertisements.

That one-in-eight figure, if it holds at scale, represents a meaningful distortion in a market where portal rankings and click-through rates directly influence which properties sell fastest. Agents who reuse compelling photography from a premium show apartment in Downtown Dubai to dress a less photogenic unit in Jumeirah Village Circle get a competitive advantage that has nothing to do with the actual asset.

RERA has signalled that its 2026 brokerage compliance calendar will include expanded portal audits, and the agency is reportedly in discussion with both major listing platforms about mandatory watermarking tied to permit numbers — a step that would make image theft immediately traceable. Buyers navigating the market now should cross-reference any listing photograph against the Trakheesi permit number on the RERA Dubai app, confirm that the permit expiry date is current, and request raw, unedited photographs from the agent before signing any reservation form. In a market moving this fast, the due diligence that used to take weeks now needs to happen in days.