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Sunshine Coast Agents Battle Decade of Fake Property Photos Online
A rash of duplicate and misleading property photos circulating across real estate platforms has its roots in a decade of breakneck coastal growth, and local agents and councils are only now catching up.
How we reported this
The Sunshine Coast property market is no stranger to fierce competition, but a less glamorous problem has been compounding in the background: duplicate listing images, recycled photographs and misrepresented property visuals appearing across multiple real estate platforms simultaneously. The practice, long dismissed as a minor inconvenience, has drawn fresh attention from Queensland's Office of Fair Trading as the region's population surge puts unprecedented volume through local listing portals.
It did not happen overnight. Understanding how the region reached this point requires going back to roughly 2016, when the Sunshine Coast Regional Council approved the framework for the Maroochydore City Centre, a ground-up CBD being built on a 53-hectare former golf course site near Duporth Avenue. That project catalysed a wave of investor interest from Brisbane, Sydney and overseas that flooded local agents with stock they were ill-equipped, at the time, to photograph, manage and publish at scale.
Volume, Speed and the Shortcuts That Followed
Between 2016 and 2024, the Sunshine Coast's resident population grew by roughly 15 percent, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics regional population data, one of the fastest growth rates of any non-capital area in Queensland. That pressure showed up everywhere: in the queue at the Sunshine Coast University Hospital emergency department, in the approval backlog at Caloundra's council offices on Omrah Avenue, and inside the back-end systems of every agency uploading listings to platforms like realestate.com.au and Domain.
As stock volumes climbed, some agencies, particularly smaller operators in holiday-heavy corridors like Noosa Heads, Coolum Beach and Mooloolaba, began reusing archived photography rather than commissioning fresh shoots for every new listing. A beachside unit on The Esplanade at Mooloolaba, re-let or re-sold multiple times across a few years, might carry the same set of hero images through three or four separate campaigns. On the platform side, automated ingestion systems designed for speed rather than duplication detection made this almost invisible to the casual buyer or renter scrolling on a Saturday morning.
Short-term rental regulation added another layer. When the Queensland Government moved in 2023 to require short-term rental properties on the Sunshine Coast to register under the state's accommodation register, thousands of properties that had operated quietly through platforms such as Airbnb suddenly needed formal listings, and many landlords reached for old photos rather than pay for new ones. The Sunshine Coast Council's own short-term rental data, published as part of its housing strategy consultation in 2024, flagged more than 8,400 active short-term rental properties across the local government area at the time of assessment, a number that represented a significant spike from earlier years.
Where the Industry Stands Now
The Real Estate Institute of Queensland, which covers Sunshine Coast member agencies, has pushed professional photography standards as part of its ongoing training programs, though compliance remains voluntary for the most part. Meanwhile, the Maroochydore CBD project itself, now with commercial and residential towers under active construction near Cornmeal Parade, is generating a new wave of off-the-plan listings where the duplication risk is arguably greater, since renders and stock images by definition represent buildings that do not yet exist.
For buyers and renters navigating this environment, the practical advice from consumer advocacy groups is consistent: cross-reference listing images using a reverse image search before arranging an inspection, request a dated photographic record from the agent, and check the listing date against any previous sales or rental history available through public title search tools. The Queensland Titles Registry, accessible online, allows anyone to pull a property's transaction history for a small fee, typically around $17.40 per title search as of mid-2026, which can quickly reveal whether a property has been listed repeatedly under suspiciously similar imagery.
Regulators and industry bodies are working toward better automated detection, but the tools lag behind the volume. On a coast that keeps growing, that gap is unlikely to close itself without deliberate intervention from both government and the platforms themselves.