Fake mansion photos appear again, this time in the Vancouver Province. Is it time for the RECBC to draft guidelines for the way a listing can market a property? - UPDATED

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UPDATE: See below for response fron Vancouver Province Editor Erik Rolfsen

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Yesterday we talked about the big news in real estate this week, the release of the R/E sales statistics for February, 2013.

The story was in all the media, but did you happen to notice the March 4th Vancouver Province Newspaper article titled "Vancouver home sales plunge 29% in February, prices fall"? (that's a screenshot of the story above).

 Did you notice the picture and caption accompanying the story?

The photo caption says: "The exterior of 3810 Marine Drive in West Vancouver.  The 5,500 square foot waterfront mansion is listed for $38 million."

Of course, if you follow this blog (and clearly the Province Newspaper does not), you know there is no such mansion. The house pictured isn't really there.

How is it that one of Vancouver's daily newspaper's continues to perpetuate this fallacy, particularly since the Province's sister newspaper - the Vancouver Sun - has already issued a statement about why it pulled the photos it published?

You will recall that Business in Vancouver explored the issue:

BIV noted that:

The story first appeared in the North Shore News on February 18 about a house listed for $38 million, accompanied by a photo of the real house, a sprawling rancher-style suburban home.

The fake photos went viral when the story was picked up by the Vancouver Sun, who added a photo gallery showing gilt-covered rooms in the style of Louis XVI and the opulent exterior of the house, taken from the realtor’s website.

The paper neglected to say that the images were photo illustrations. On February 25, the Sun published a correction, and the story has now been removed from its website.

But by then, the story had been picked up by the U.K.’s Daily Mail, who published the photos on its website under the headline: “The $38 million Vancouver mansion that is Canada's most expensive home and also one of its ugliest too.”

Realtor Laura McLaren said the blogger is wrong and that the photos on her site, which have now all been removed apart from the external shot (pictured above), were always identified as photo renderings of "what could be built on this property."

“The pictures are renderings and you can see that they’re renderings … Each picture had ‘these are renderings,’” said McLaren.

But as we noted in our original post, the main page of the real estate agent's website gave no indication that the photos were renderings.

When you clicked on the listing, the summary page showed 19 thumbnail photos.  This summary page also gave no indication that any of these photos were "renderings".  

The official explanation is that this was all clearly explained in small captions on the individual photos themselves.

The media frenzy supposedly erupted when the fourth estate horde (and misguided bloggers) failed to research the issue. If they had only read the fine print on individual photos from the agent's website, the media would have known better and not run with the errors in this story. 

Yes, there were 19 photos in the agent's webpage listing.  Yes, 13 of those 19 photos showed a 'fake' mansion... and yes, there were only two actual photos of the real house on the property in that listing (aerial ones at that and no interior pictures); but the fine print explains it all?

Is this really an acceptable way to present a property for sale in the eyes of the Real Estate Council of BC?

(One has to wonder that if it's a property being promoted for 'what can be done with the land', why is it there were no 'renderings' promoting how the lot could be subdivided into three - it's chief selling feature? Why no photos of what the property might look like with 3 smaller mansions on the site alongside those of the gaudy mansion showing what could be done if one house were built?)

So what we have here is a story the North Shore News originally published February 18th (a story, it must be noted, that only carried one photo - that of the real teardown bungalow), morphed into one that was picked up by papers like the Edmonton Journal on February 19th (which carried the North Shore News reporter's byline - but now sported the fake mansion photo prominently), and by Saturday February 23rd it exploded onto the pages of the Vancouver Sun complete with all 13 'fake' photos presented as the actual mansion for sale (and going viral world-wide after that). 

Over a week later - even after having been exposed as fake - the gaudy facade is still being propagated by the Vancouver Province as an actual home for sale.

How was this allowed to happen?

How did this story morph so badly from the one that appeared February 18th in the North Shore News as a teardown bungalow to the one that appeared February 19th in the Edmonton Journal as a gaudy, opulent mansion?

Don't the 'renderings' and the way they were presented play a key role here?

As one contributor to the comments section of this blog observed, if this is the new standard for real estate marketing in Greater Vancouver why not simply graft a picture of the Burj Khalifa overtop of the local crack shack property?

If the Real Estate Council of BC (RECBC) doesn't have guidelines to protect the public, why not fake things in a big, big way?

In the meantime, perhaps the RECBC can contact the Vancouver Province and set them straight on what's actually on the land at 3810 Marine Drive?

Someone should do something to sort out the ongoing media confusion.

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UPDATE: Response from Vancouver Province Editor Erik Rolfsen posted in comments section:

If you had been paying attention two weeks ago when every media outlet in town was scrambling to post a gallery of this phony house, you might have noticed that The Province was the one outlet that had it right. That's because I personally picked up the phone and questioned the agent representing this property about the suspicious images. He graciously explained that they were indeed artist's renderings. We included this information on the photo gallery we published on our site at the time (we were the only ones to do so), but we later suppressed it altogether because it seems pointless to show people photos of a house that doesn't exist.

The story you reference above is a wire story from Canadian Press that was packaged by CP on Monday and appeared on our site via an automated feed to which we subscribe. Clearly they searched the archives for a recent listing to accompany their story and grabbed one of the renderings. I see that somebody has since brought the error to their attention and the photo no longer accompanies their package.

Thanks for the attention, though.

Erik Rolfsen (Province News Editor)

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