Property Photo Alt Text: 12 Real Listings Checked
By AutoBoost Team · 2026-10-29 · 6 min read
Only one alt text in 12 told a buyer something about the photo. The rest repeated the street, a code or a number. On 29 October 2026 we tried 37 UK property and estate agent websites and fetched the page HTML ourselves with curl. 22 loaded, and 15 blocked us or did not answer, so we skipped them. From the pages that loaded we kept 12 real alt texts from 9 sites, all taken from public listing pages or from listings shown on a home page. Every URL below is the page we fetched, and every alt text is copied exactly as it appears in the HTML.
Key takeaways
- Only 1 of the 12 examples was good. 3 were fine and 8 had a fault.
- The most common fault was repeating the same text on every photo of a listing. We saw it on 4 of the 12 rows.
- Codes and numbers came next. "Photo 1", "view1" and "NWCA4919084" tell a screen reader user nothing.
- The one good example named the room and the home. The faulty ones named the street.
Twelve photos from live listing pages
| Site | Alt text | Characters | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| OnTheMarket | Royal Gateway - Show Home - Lounge | 34 | Good. Names the development, the home and the room. |
| OnTheMarket | Balcony | 7 | Fine. Names what is shown, but adds no detail. |
| OnTheMarket | 1 bedroom flat for sale, Greenslade Road, Barking, London, IG11 | 63 | Fault. The same text is on all 5 photos of the listing, and it describes the listing, not the photo. |
| Rightmove | Photo 1 | 7 | Fault. A number, not a description. |
| Rightmove | Lily House (with a trailing space) | 11 | Fault. A building name only, the same on 3 photos. |
| Leaders | 2 bedroom apartment to rent - Cambanks, Cambridge, CB4 - Property View 1 | 72 | Fine. Specific to the property, but it repeats the page heading and does not say what the photo shows. |
| Dexters | Properties for sale in Blackfriars Road - SE1 9GJ view1 | 55 | Fault. Template wording with a postcode and a number. Views 1 to 9 all follow it. |
| Martin & Co | 2 bedroom Flat for Sale Uverdale Road, Chelsea | 46 | Fault. The same alt text is on all 7 gallery photos. |
| Foxtons | NWCA4919084 | 11 | Fault. A reference code, used on more than one photo of the same listing. |
| Strutt & Parker | empty | 0 | Fault. 247 of the 248 images on the page have an empty alt attribute. |
| Chestertons | Image of Apartment - 3 Bedrooms - 4 Bathrooms for Sale in Grand Cayman-Bodden Town-Cayman Islands, Image 1 | 106 | Fault. Starts with "Image of", is far too long and ends in a photo number. |
| Winkworth | a house with a large lawn and a tree | 36 | Fine. Plain and accurate for a home page picture, but it is a generic caption, not a listing. |
Room first, then the home
We found one good example, so it carries limited weight, but it gives the clearest pattern in the table. It is the OnTheMarket show home gallery. The alt text Royal Gateway - Show Home - Lounge does three things:
- It says which development and which home the photo belongs to.
- It says which room is shown.
- It is different on every photo. The same gallery has
Royal Gateway - Show Home - KitchenandRoyal Gateway - Show Home - Bedroom.
That suggests writing the room or the view first. A visitor who cannot see the gallery wants to know what comes next: lounge, kitchen, garden, front of the building.
A name on its own is not enough, though. Balcony is accurate, but it was the weakest of the fine examples. Add one thing a buyer can use, such as the view or the size, if you can see it in the photo.
Floorplans got better treatment than photos on two sites. Rightmove labels them Floorplan 1 and Martin & Co uses Floorplan. The label is correct, but the facts in a floorplan still need to be in the page text.
Leave the address to the page heading
The bedroom count, the street, the postcode and "for sale" were repeated in the alt text of OnTheMarket, Leaders, Dexters and Martin & Co. A screen reader reads the page heading and then reads it again on every photo. Photo numbers, reference codes and the words "image of" fare no better, because none of them tell a visitor anything.
Same text on every photo, and the other faults
Counted from the 12 rows:
- Same text on several photos of one listing: 4 rows (OnTheMarket, Rightmove Lily House, Martin & Co, Foxtons).
- Address or listing details instead of the photo: 4 faulty rows (OnTheMarket, Dexters, Martin & Co, Chestertons), plus Leaders, which we marked as fine.
- A number or code instead of words: 2 rows (Rightmove "Photo 1" and Foxtons). Dexters, Leaders and Chestertons also end with a number.
- Empty alt text: 1 row (Strutt & Parker), on 247 images on one page.
- Starts with "Image of": 1 row (Chestertons).
- A stray trailing space: 1 row (Rightmove "Lily House ").
Bulk templates cause most of these. One template fills every photo with the same text, so the fix has to give each image its own words.
Length did not separate the good from the weak. Across the 12 rows the lengths ranged from 0 to 106 characters, with a middle value of 35, and the good example was 34. The shortest faults were codes and numbers, at 7 to 11 characters. The ones at 55 to 72 characters were long because they repeated the address. Only the Chestertons text went past 100. Between 30 and 60 characters is enough to name the room and the home.
Tip: give each photo its own room name
In a gallery, work through the photos in order and write the room or view on each one, leaving the address to the listing heading. People and social posts show the same habit of copying nearby text, as our guides to headshot alt text and social media image alt text describe. For a whole site, the main guide to bulk alt text is the place to start.
If your property site runs on WordPress, the free AutoBoost SEO plugin links it to the AutoBoost SEO app. The app writes missing alt text for the images in your posts in bulk, and you read each suggestion against the photo before it saves to the post and the media library.