How the Sunshine Coast's Building Boom Left Thousands of Property Listings With the Wrong Photo

Property records across the Sunshine Coast are riddled with mismatched, recycled and outright duplicated images, a problem years in the making, now drawing attention from real estate bodies, short-term rental regulators and Sunshine Coast Council's planning directorate as the region absorbs one of the fastest population expansions in Queensland history.

The issue is neither new nor trivial. When a single dwelling photo circulates across multiple listings on platforms like Airbnb and property sales portals simultaneously, buyers, renters and regulators lose a basic tool for confirming what they are actually looking at. On the Sunshine Coast, where the Maroochydore CBD urban renewal project has generated hundreds of new apartment approvals since the masterplan received formal backing in 2017, the pace of development has outrun the processes meant to keep records accurate.

How the Coast Got Here

The roots of the problem run back to the mid-2010s. Real estate agencies operating out of Mooloolaba, Buderim and Noosa Heads routinely shared image libraries across franchise networks. A rendered photo of one beachside complex on Alexandra Parade could appear, legally at the time, on a listing for a comparable building two suburbs away. Regulation was light and the practice was industry-standard.

Then came the population surge. The Sunshine Coast grew by roughly 15,000 residents per year through the early 2020s, according to Queensland Government Statistician's Office projections that have been cited in Sunshine Coast Council planning documents. Demand for short-term rental accommodation near Minyama, Coolum Beach and Peregian Beach drove an explosion in new listings. Owners in a hurry borrowed images from neighbouring properties, management companies recycled stock photography, and the Sunshine Coast's short-term rental registry, which the council began developing in earnest following state government moves to tighten holiday letting rules from 2023 onward, struggled to match listings to verified property photographs.

The Sunshine Coast University Hospital expansion at Birtinya, which added new clinical wings and drove demand for staff accommodation around Kawana Waters, added another layer. Hundreds of units marketed to healthcare workers and travelling nurses were listed with generic floor-plan images or duplicated photos from builder display suites. Sunshine Coast Council's planning and development team acknowledged in its 2024-25 annual report that addressing data quality across the property register was a priority action for the coming financial year, though no specific funding figure was attached publicly to that commitment.

The Regulatory Push and What It Means Locally

Queensland's short-term rental registration framework, introduced under amendments to the Tourism Accommodation Act, requires hosts to submit a photograph of the property exterior as part of registration. That requirement, which came into practical effect for new registrations from January 2025, was designed precisely to address the duplicate-image problem. But enforcement has been uneven.

On platforms audited informally by housing advocates in the Noosa and Maroochydore areas, a significant share of new listings in early 2025 still showed images that reverse-image searches could match to other active listings in different suburbs, or in some cases, in different states entirely. The Real Estate Institute of Queensland has published guidance to its members on image verification obligations, though compliance sits with individual agencies.

For buyers and renters on the ground, the practical advice from conveyancers operating in the Maroochydore and Caloundra markets is consistent: request a current, dated photograph taken at the property, cross-reference the listing address against council's PD Online planning portal, and ask for a statutory declaration if anything looks off. For short-term guests, checking Google Street View against the listing's stated address before booking remains a basic but effective check.

Sunshine Coast Council's broader property data audit, part of its digital transformation roadmap outlined for the 2025-2028 period, is expected to reach the short-term rental subset of the register before the end of this calendar year. Whether the audit produces enforceable outcomes, or simply better record-keeping, will depend on how the council and state agencies choose to use what they find.