'My landlord used the same photo for three different flats': Londoners on the chaos of duplicate property listings

A single photograph of a Peckham bathroom has appeared in listings for properties on at least three separate streets. The image — showing a clawfoot tub and a frosted window — has turned up on Rightmove, Zoopla and a smaller regional portal, each time attached to a different address, a different price, and a different letting agent. It is not an isolated case.

Across London, renters say the practice of recycling property photographs — sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately — is creating confusion, wasting their time, and in some cases leading them to hand over holding deposits on homes they have never actually seen. With average London rents sitting above £2,600 per month according to figures published by Rightmove in early 2026, the stakes of any misdirection are high.

A problem with real costs

In Hackney, a community advice drop-in run by the East London Renters Union at a church hall on Morning Lane has been fielding complaints about the issue since at least January. Volunteers there describe a pattern: a prospective tenant pays a holding deposit — typically capped at one week's rent under the Tenant Fees Act 2019 — after viewing photographs online, only to discover on arrival that the property looks nothing like the images. Sometimes the flat is smaller. Sometimes the kitchen in the photos belongs to a completely different unit in the same block.

One member of the group, a nursing assistant who rents in Walthamstow and asked not to be named, described spending three consecutive Saturdays travelling to viewings in Stratford, Dalston and Lewisham, each time finding that the advertised photographs corresponded to a different flat than the one she was shown. She did not find a home during those weeks. She did not get her travel costs back.

The issue has a technical name in the property industry: duplicate image replacement, or DIR. It happens when letting agents upload stock images to multiple listings, reuse photographs from previously tenanted properties, or — in more troubling cases — lift images from other agents' listings entirely. Trading Standards bodies have the power to pursue agents for misleading property descriptions under the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, but enforcement is patchy and prosecution is rare.

What the platforms say — and what renters are asking for

Rightmove introduced automated duplicate image detection tools for agents in 2023, though the company has not published data on how often the tools flag or remove listings. Zoopla operates a similar internal review system. Neither platform carries a public-facing register of flagged or removed listings, which renters say makes it impossible to know whether a complaint has been acted upon.

The London Renters Union, which operates across multiple boroughs including Lambeth, Islington and Tower Hamlets, has been calling on the Mayor's office to use its convening powers to push the major portals toward a shared image-fingerprinting database — a system that would flag when the same photograph appears across listings at different addresses simultaneously. The idea is not new: it has been discussed in industry circles for several years. It has not been implemented.

Sadiq Khan's office has committed in principle to strengthening renter protections as part of the broader agenda around London's housing crisis, though no specific DIR policy has been announced. The Renters' Rights Act, which passed through Parliament earlier this year, addresses tenancy security and the abolition of Section 21 no-fault evictions, but is largely silent on advertising standards and portal accountability.

For renters trying to navigate the market now, the advice from the East London Renters Union is practical: use a reverse image search on every listing photograph before booking a viewing, cross-reference the address against Land Registry records to confirm it matches what the agent has described, and report duplicate listings directly to both the portal and the relevant local Trading Standards office — in most London boroughs, that means contacting your local council's consumer protection team. It takes time nobody in a hot rental market has. But until the platforms act, it may be the only check available.