Property owners left in limbo as duplicate listing images create confusion across Central Coast real estate market

A growing number of Central Coast homeowners and renters say they have been burned by duplicate or incorrectly matched images appearing on real estate listings, with complaints concentrating around the Gosford CBD corridor and lakeside suburbs including Budgewoi and The Entrance. The problem — known in digital publishing and property portal circles as duplicate image replacement — occurs when automated systems swap, overwrite or replicate photos across multiple listings, leaving buyers and renters inspecting properties that look nothing like the photographs they saw online.

The issue has gained fresh urgency this week as Sydney's record-breaking winter heat pushes more prospective buyers to look beyond the metropolitan fringe for affordable housing. With median house prices in parts of the Central Coast sitting well below Sydney's, the region has become a pressure valve for buyers priced out of the city — and many of them are making initial decisions entirely on the strength of photographs viewed on property portals from their lounge rooms in Parramatta or the Inner West.

What residents are experiencing

At the Gosford office of Central Coast Tenants Advice and Advocacy Service on Mann Street, caseworkers say they have fielded a noticeable uptick in complaints this year from renters who arrived at properties on Georgiana Terrace or along Faunce Street West to find interiors that bore no resemblance to the listing imagery. The service, which operates under Legal Aid NSW funding, confirmed it has been documenting the pattern, though it declined to provide a specific complaint tally before finalising its quarterly figures.

In the Entrance Road suburb of Long Jetty, a local Facebook group with more than 4,200 members has become an informal clearinghouse for residents flagging mismatched listings. Posts this month alone have called out at least three separate instances where photographs from one unit block appeared attached to a neighbouring or entirely unrelated property on major portal sites. One post, which attracted more than 80 comments by Friday afternoon, described a family driving from Penrith to inspect a two-bedroom unit near The Entrance pier, only to find the bright renovated kitchen in the photos belonged to a different apartment on the same floor.

The problem is not confined to rentals. In Gosford's emerging CBD renewal precinct — where the NSW Government's Gosford Urban Renewal project has been driving a mix of new residential towers and refurbished heritage buildings since the early 2020s — buyers say they have encountered floorplan images and exterior shots from one development attached to listings for a neighbouring site. One property on Donnison Street was reportedly listed with images drawn from a building on Mann Street, creating confusion during a period when multiple similar-looking residential towers are under construction or recently completed within a few blocks of each other.

Why it keeps happening — and what needs to change

Digital asset managers who work with property platforms say the root cause is algorithmic image deduplication — a process designed to save server storage costs by identifying and collapsing visually similar images into a single file. When two properties share a building style, the same developer's display suite photos, or even the same real estate photographer's watermark, the system can incorrectly flag and merge their image sets. The result is a listing that is technically live and legally marketed but visually misleading.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's guidance on misleading representations in real estate advertising has existed since at least 2021, and NSW Fair Trading handles complaints about property listings under the Property and Stock Agents Act 2002. Residents who believe a listing is materially misleading can lodge a complaint directly through the NSW Fair Trading online portal, referencing the specific listing URL and documenting the discrepancy with screenshots taken at the time of viewing.

For Central Coast Council, which is still rebuilding public trust following its period of financial administration that ended in 2021, the proliferation of inaccurate listing data in the Gosford renewal precinct is an unwanted complication. The council's economic development team has been actively promoting the CBD regeneration to attract both residents and investors. Listings that display the wrong building undermine that pitch.

Residents and buyers dealing with this problem are advised to cross-check listing photos against the property's listed address on Google Street View, request a statutory Form 1 disclosure from the selling agent before any inspection, and report persistent mismatches to NSW Fair Trading on 13 32 20. Agents who knowingly allow inaccurate imagery to remain on a live listing face potential disciplinary action under the 2002 Act.