Stolen Identities, Wrong Addresses: Central Coast Residents Speak Out on Duplicate Image Crisis

Residents from Gosford to Wyong are pushing back against a problem that has quietly ballooned in the past eighteen months: their homes are appearing in the wrong listings, under wrong addresses, or paired with photographs of entirely different properties in both commercial real estate portals and Central Coast Council's own property records system. The issue — broadly described as duplicate image replacement, where a property's photos are overwritten or mismatched with images from another address — has triggered formal complaints to the council's customer service desk and drawn scrutiny from the Real Estate Institute of NSW.

The timing matters. Central Coast Council only exited formal financial administration in March 2024 after a period of deep structural reform, and its digital infrastructure is still catching up. Multiple residents say they first noticed problems after the council migrated property data to a new integrated management platform. That migration, which was flagged in council budget documents as part of a broader digital modernisation program, appears to have introduced indexing errors that allowed images tied to one lot number to display against a different address in public-facing portals.

Wrong House, Real Consequences

On Georgiana Terrace in Gosford's CBD fringe — an area that has seen a wave of unit development linked to the Gosford Activation Precinct renewal program — at least three property owners reported to the council between February and April 2026 that their building's exterior photographs had been replaced in online records by images of a property on Dwyer Street, about 400 metres away. One owner, who did not wish to be named, told The Daily Central Coast the mismatch caused a prospective tenant to show up at the wrong address, and that the error persisted for six weeks before it was corrected. Another resident said the confusion led to a rates notice being queried because the photo attached to the title search did not match the physical dwelling.

Further north, around the Wyong town centre near the Wyong River corridor, community members connected through the Central Coast Tenants' Advice and Advocacy Service say duplicate images have complicated rental inspections. Prospective renters booking viewings through major portals have arrived at addresses that bear no resemblance to the photographs shown online. The Tenants' Advice Service, which operates from its Gosford office on Donnison Street, has logged a growing caseload of inquiries related to misleading property imagery, though the organisation has not yet released a formal count for the 2025–26 financial year.

What the Data Suggests

Australia's property data market is substantial enough that even small error rates carry large human costs. The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimated in 2024 that NSW recorded more than 180,000 residential property transactions in a single calendar year. On the Central Coast, where median house prices in suburbs like Wamberal and Terrigal were tracking above $1.1 million in early 2026 according to CoreLogic's regional market data, a mistaken or duplicated image attached to a listing can affect both sale price negotiations and rental valuations. For renters already stretched by an affordability crisis that has made the coast a pressure valve for Sydney workers commuting via the Newcastle line, the extra friction of chasing down wrong-address listings is not a minor irritant — it is a material obstacle.

Central Coast Council has a formal process for requesting corrections to property information through its online service portal, with a stated turnaround of ten business days for non-urgent record amendments. Residents who believe their property's images have been duplicated or incorrectly replaced are advised to lodge a request through the council's Property Enquiry category on that portal, attaching dated photographs of their actual dwelling as supporting evidence. The Real Estate Institute of NSW also maintains a consumer complaint pathway for errors that originate within commercial listing platforms rather than council systems.

A community meeting hosted by the Gosford-based Central Coast Community Legal Centre on Mann Street is scheduled for late July 2026, where digital rights and property record accuracy are listed as agenda items. For affected residents, that gathering may offer the clearest path yet to collective pressure on both the council and the commercial portals to audit their databases and prevent the next round of mismatches before they occur.