Ho Chi Minh City Real Estate Sites Battle Duplicate Photo Crisis

Walk into any co-working space along Nguyen Van Thu Street in District 1 and ask a property agent about duplicate listing photos. Most will laugh. The practice, recycling the same stock or stolen images across hundreds of unrelated listings, became so embedded in Ho Chi Minh City's online real estate ecosystem that platforms normalised it long before regulators noticed.

The story of how Vietnam's commercial capital arrived at this point is not a simple one. It runs through a decade of explosive smartphone adoption, a chaotic property boom that peaked in 2021 and 2022, and a near-total absence of image verification standards on domestic listing portals. The result is a market where a single photograph of a sun-drenched apartment balcony in Binh Thanh District can simultaneously represent dozens of properties across seven different districts.

The Roots of the Problem

Vietnam's internet penetration crossed 70 percent of the population around 2020, according to data published by the Vietnam Internet Network Information Centre (VNNIC). That surge pushed an entire generation of landlords, developers and small brokers online almost overnight. Portals such as Batdongsan.com.vn and Nha.vn absorbed the traffic, but their listing-submission systems were built for speed, not verification. Uploading a property took minutes. Uploading someone else's photos took the same amount of time.

The real estate boom of 2021 and early 2022 poured fuel onto the problem. New project launches in Thu Duc City, the administrative unit carved from three former districts in 2021, generated thousands of listings per month at peak. Brokers working on thin commissions and high volume had every incentive to grab attractive images from anywhere, attach them to a unit in Vincity Grand Park or Vinhomes Central Park, and push the listing live before a competitor did. Price per square metre in some Thu Duc corridors climbed past 60 million dong during that period, making the stakes for a single deal extremely high and the shortcuts more tempting.

The market correction that began in late 2022 and deepened through 2023 changed the economics but not the habits. Transaction volumes fell sharply. Developers in Binh Duong and Long An provinces slashed asking prices by 20 to 30 percent on some secondary-market units. But the portals still carried millions of listings, many with images that had been copied, mirrored or lightly cropped to fool basic hash-based detection tools.

Regulation Arrives, Slowly

Vietnam's Ministry of Information and Communications issued Circular 22/2023/TT-BTTTT, which for the first time set requirements for e-commerce platforms operating in the real estate space to implement content authenticity checks. The circular gave platforms a compliance window running into mid-2024. Enforcement, however, lagged. The Ho Chi Minh City Department of Construction, which oversees project legality rather than listing content, referred image-fraud complaints to the Ministry of Public Security's cybercrime unit, creating a jurisdictional gap that brokers quietly exploited.

The Ho Chi Minh City Real Estate Association (HoREA) flagged duplicate imagery as a consumer-protection concern in its 2024 annual report, recommending that major portals adopt perceptual hash comparison and GPS-tagged photo requirements. Neither mandate has become law as of July 2026, though Batdongsan.com.vn introduced voluntary AI-assisted image screening on its premium listing tiers in the first quarter of 2025.

For buyers, particularly the growing expat community concentrated in the Thao Dien ward of Thu Duc City and along Nguyen Dinh Chieu Street in District 3, the practical advice is unchanged from what reputable agents have offered for years: demand a physical site visit before any deposit changes hands, request timestamped photos taken by the agent on the day of viewing, and cross-check listing images against Google Street View where exterior shots are involved. Vietnam's new Real Estate Business Law, which came into full effect on January 1, 2025, strengthened buyers' rights to verified property documentation, but that protection does not yet extend to the accuracy of marketing images.

Until platform-level verification becomes mandatory, and HoREA continues to push for that standard ahead of the National Assembly's next legislative review cycle, due diligence remains the buyer's problem, not the portal's.