How Barcelona's Housing Portal Ended Up Flooded With Duplicate Listing Images — And Why the City Is Only Now Cleaning It Up

Barcelona's municipal housing registry, the Registre de Sol·licitants d'Habitatge de Protecció Oficial, has been quietly running a technical remediation programme since January 2026 to strip out thousands of duplicate images that accumulated across its public-facing listings portal — a problem that, officials at the Ajuntament de Barcelona's Housing Department acknowledge in internal procurement documents reviewed by this newspaper, dates back at least to 2019.

The immediate trigger was a December 2025 audit commissioned by Mayor Jaume Collboni's administration as part of the broader Pla pel Dret a l'Habitatge 2024–2030. That plan, adopted formally in the spring of 2024, committed Barcelona to creating a single, verified digital inventory of every protected and social housing unit in the city. When technical contractors began migrating legacy data into the new unified system, they found the same property photographs appearing under multiple listing IDs — in some cases the same street-facing façade image attached to dozens of separate entries across different neighbourhoods.

How the Mess Accumulated

The roots run back to the period between 2015 and 2020, when the city's housing bureaucracy was managing three separate, poorly integrated databases simultaneously. The municipal office on Carrer de Bigai handled social housing waitlists. The Consorci de l'Habitatge de Barcelona, based near the Diagonal, maintained its own portfolio records. And a third system, inherited from the Generalitat de Catalunya, tracked subsidised rentals under regional programmes. Each platform used different image-naming conventions and none enforced uniqueness checks at upload.

Then came the short-term rental crackdown. From 2017 onward, as the city began revoking tourist apartment licences — a process that accelerated sharply after Collboni's 2023 election pledge to eliminate all 10,101 existing habitatge d'ús turístic licences by their 2028 expiry — thousands of previously tourist-listed properties began re-entering the long-term rental and affordable housing pipeline. Many of those properties arrived with image files scraped or exported from Airbnb and Booking.com listings, already compressed, inconsistently named and sometimes watermarked by third-party photographers. When housing officers uploaded them into the municipal system without a deduplication layer, the problem compounded rapidly.

The Eixample district, which accounts for a disproportionate share of converted tourist flats, shows the highest concentration of duplicate image records, according to the procurement audit summary. The Gràcia and Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i la Ribera neighbourhoods follow. Together, those three areas represent a significant portion of the roughly 4,200 affected listing entries identified so far.

What Deduplication Actually Involves

The remediation contract, awarded in January 2026 to a Barcelona-based software firm through the city's public procurement platform, Perfil del Contractant, involves running perceptual hash comparisons across the entire image library — a technique that detects visually identical or near-identical photographs even when file names differ. Each flagged duplicate is then reviewed manually by a small team housed at the Oficina de l'Habitatge on Carrer de Llull in Poblenou before the redundant entry is either merged or deleted.

The process matters beyond tidiness. Duplicate images create false impressions of housing stock availability. A renter searching the portal for a two-bedroom flat in Nou Barris may encounter what appears to be ten distinct options but is actually three properties photographed from the same angle and uploaded multiple times under different reference numbers. That distortion, housing advocates at Sindicat de Llogateres have publicly argued in forums and campaign materials, erodes trust in the official system at exactly the moment when renters most need reliable public information.

The city has set a completion target of October 2026 for the first full deduplication pass, ahead of the next scheduled update to the Pla pel Dret a l'Habitatge progress report due in November. Residents using the housing portal in the interim can cross-reference any listing against the property's referència cadastral number — a unique identifier issued by the national Catastro that cannot be duplicated — to verify they are looking at a genuinely distinct property before submitting a formal expression of interest.