Johannesburg Removes Thousands of Fake Property Photos From Listings

Johannesburg's property advertising market has a junk-image problem, and it did not appear overnight. For at least a decade, rental listings on major South African portals have recycled the same stock photographs, identical lounge interiors, the same granite kitchen countertop shot from Sandton appearing in a Soweto-area listing, the same Norwood garden flat photo cloned across four separate adverts on the same day. The practice has become so routine that property professionals now have a shorthand for it: ghost listing.

The timing of the current push to clean up those listings matters. South Africa's rental vacancy rate in Gauteng has tightened significantly since 2023, according to industry data published by Lightstone Property, putting desperate tenants, many of them recently arrived Zimbabwean and Mozambican migrants seeking accommodation near the CBD or in areas like Rosettenville and Turffontein, at serious risk of losing deposit money on units that either do not exist or look nothing like the photographs advertised.

How the Duplicate Image Ecosystem Took Root

The roots of the problem run back to roughly 2014 and 2015, when South African property portals began dropping their per-listing fees to compete for agent volume. Smaller agencies, particularly those operating out of Hillbrow and Berea where stock turns fast and margins are thin, responded by bulk-uploading listings with whatever images were at hand. A single agent could post thirty apartments using ten photographs, rotating them across addresses. Portal moderation was light. Complaints went to generic inboxes.

By 2019, PropTech researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand's School of Construction Economics and Management were documenting the pattern in internal working papers, noting that image duplication was most concentrated in the inner-city rental corridor stretching from Yeoville down to Jeppestown. Fraudulent listings accelerated again during the Covid-19 lockdown period from March 2020, when in-person inspections became impossible and desperate renters were more willing to commit a deposit based on screen images alone.

The Rental Housing Tribunal of Gauteng recorded a sharp uptick in deposit dispute filings from mid-2020 onwards, a fact that local housing advocates have cited repeatedly in submissions to the Gauteng Human Settlements Department. The Tribunal, which operates offices at 78 Fox Street in the Johannesburg CBD, does not have the mandate to regulate advertising images, a jurisdictional gap that has never been formally closed.

Platforms, Portals and Pressure to Act

South Africa's two dominant residential property portals, Property24 and Private Property, both introduced automated duplicate-image detection tools, though neither publicised the exact rollout dates until industry bodies pressed them for clarity. Property24's enhanced image-matching system was confirmed in communications to registered agents in early 2024. Private Property followed with its own flagging system later that year. Both systems work by generating a hash of uploaded images and comparing them against an existing database, a method that catches exact copies but struggles with slightly cropped or colour-adjusted duplicates, the technique most sophisticated fraudsters quickly migrated to.

The Estate Agency Affairs Board, which regulates licensed property practitioners under the Property Practitioners Act of 2019, updated its conduct guidelines in 2025 to explicitly include digital advertising integrity as a compliance obligation. Practitioners who are found to have used misleading images can face fines or suspension of their Fidelity Fund Certificate, without which they cannot legally conclude transactions.

For renters, the practical picture remains uneven. A two-bedroom flat in Turffontein currently advertises for between R6 500 and R9 000 per month on major portals, but tenants who have been burned by ghost listings are increasingly demanding video walkthroughs before committing any money. Several Johannesburg-based letting agencies, including operations in the Rosebank and Melville corridors, have made live virtual tours a standard part of their intake process, partly in response to tenant pressure and partly to protect themselves from Tribunal complaints.

The Gauteng Human Settlements Department has indicated it is reviewing whether image verification requirements should be incorporated into the proposed update to the Rental Housing Act regulations, though no draft has been published for public comment as of the first week of July 2026. Until that happens, the burden of verification stays squarely with the tenant, scroll past the perfect kitchen, and ask for the video.