Ecommerce duplicate content

I am working on a vacation rental agency website. The company operates as a third party agency that rent holiday homes managed by other companies or agents therefor none of the property content they use are theirs and they copy content from other sites and use it on their own site. My question is - will they still rank with this copied content and if not should they rather alter the content to make it more unique or should they add value added services to the content. This is eccommerce and I'm not sure how google handles this type of content in 2017.

You can find you answer here.

I personally would alter the content to make it more unique. A site with duplicate content does not rank well in Search engines.

I ran a real estate site that pulled real estate property postings from the MLS, they all has the agents listing descriptions that were the same as every listing. In real estate this is pretty common practice. In fact I'm not sure every source allows you to alter content provided so check that you CAN change anything before thinking about it.

But short answer is, no the non-unique content wasn't a problem.

-THopHayt

Duplicate content is not going to hurt you, but creating original content for products and categories will help you. So, try to make your content unique and then proceed.