More evidence of media manipulation by the real-estate industry has emerged with a Vancouver newspaper’s misstep in publishing fake photos of a West Vancouver mansion for sale, the blogger who broke the MAC marketing scandal is charging.
The blogger, who goes by the name Village Whisperer, published screenshots of the realtor’s website, which do not identify the photos of the house as fake.
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.
(Read more from Business in Vancouver)
