'My Building Looks Like Someone Else's': Zurich Residents Speak Out on Duplicate Image Problem Plaguing Property Listings

A Kreis 4 tenant signed a rental contract in April for a flat on Langstrasse only to arrive on moving day and find the apartment looked nothing like the photographs she had used to justify the CHF 2,400 monthly rent. The images, she later discovered, had been used for at least two other listings on the same portal over the previous 18 months. Her story is not unusual.

Across Zurich, a city where the residential vacancy rate sits well below one percent, the practice of reusing, misrepresenting, or outright duplicating property images has quietly become one of the most corrosive problems in an already punishing rental market. With demand so far outstripping supply that some listings on Homegate and Comparis attract dozens of applications within hours, renters say they have little choice but to make fast decisions based on photographs that may be years out of date, belong to a different unit entirely, or have been lifted from a third-party image library.

A Market With No Room for Error

The stakes are high. According to data published by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office in its 2025 housing report, Zurich canton's rental vacancy rate stood at 0.56 percent, among the lowest in the country. In that environment, prospective tenants frequently commit to viewings or even sign letters of intent before they can confirm whether a listing's visuals correspond to reality. Several residents in Wiedikon and Aussersihl described spending two to three weeks arranging viewings for flats whose advertised images bore only passing resemblance to the actual properties.

The issue has a specific technical dimension. When a landlord or property manager relists a previously occupied flat, the original image set from the last tenancy — or sometimes from a renovation completed years earlier — is often copied directly into the new listing without being updated. Digital asset management at smaller Liegenschaftsverwaltung firms can be rudimentary. Community members in Schwamendingen, where older residential blocks turn over regularly, say this is especially common with photographs of kitchens and bathrooms, the two rooms most likely to have deteriorated or been modified between tenancies.

The Swiss Tenants' Association, Mieterinnen- und Mieterverband Zürich, which operates an advice centre on Militärstrasse in Kreis 4, receives a steady stream of complaints about misleading listings, though duplicate imagery specifically is difficult to track because it rarely rises to the level of a formal legal dispute. Tenants are generally left to negotiate informally with landlords or accept what they find on the day they collect the keys.

What Residents Are Asking For

Community voices gathered in recent weeks around housing advisory sessions at the Quartiertreffs in Wipkingen and Altstetten point to three practical demands: mandatory date-stamping of listing photographs, a requirement that at least one image be taken within 60 days of the listing going live, and a clearer complaints pathway through the cantonal housing authority, Wohnbauförderung des Kantons Zürich. None of those measures currently exist as enforceable standards.

Homegate, the largest Swiss property portal, publishes guidelines recommending accurate and current imagery, but compliance is voluntary and enforcement relies on user reports. A neighbourhood organiser in Altstetten noted at a Quartiertreff session in June that the gap between platform guidelines and actual practice is wide enough to drive a removal van through.

For tenants navigating the Zurich market right now, housing advisers at the Mieterverband recommend reverse-image searching every photograph in a listing before arranging a viewing. Google Images and TinEye both return results within seconds and can reveal whether a picture has appeared elsewhere online. Requesting a video walkthrough conducted live over a video call — a practice that became common during the 2020-2021 lockdowns — is another option that several community members say they now use as a baseline condition before submitting any application. Zurich's housing crunch shows no sign of easing before the end of the decade, which means the burden of verification, for now, remains with the person who has the least power in the transaction.