Laravel view render rendering as plain text/breaking

For some reason, in my Laravel 5 application, in one of my functions when I render a view and return it to an AJAX function it is returning as plain text.

I am using the same method in multiple places on my site, but in this 1 call, it seems to be breaking and looks like its rendering in plain text?

Route

Route::prefix('ajax')->group(function(){
    Route::prefix('users')->group(function(){
        Route::post('/setUserPrimaryImage', 'UserController@ajaxSetPrimaryUserImage');
    })
})

Ajax

window.setUserPrimaryImage = function(image_id, user_id, elem){
    $.post('/ajax/users/setUserPrimaryImage', {'image_id': image_id, 'user_id': user_id }, function(data){
        console.log(data);
    });
}

User Controller

public function ajaxSetPrimaryUserImage($request){
        //Get the user
        $user = User::findOrFail($request->user_id);
        //Set the primary image id to this one
        $user->primary_photo = $request->image_id;
        //Save it
        $user->save();
        //Return rendered user
        return view('pages.user.edit.edit-user-images', compact('user'))->render();
    }

pages.user.edit.edit-user-images

<div class="row" id="user-edit-images">
    <div class="col-12">
        <div class="row">
            @foreach($user->photos as $key => $image)
                <div class="col-12 col-sm-6 col-lg-4 col-xl-3">
                    <h1></h1>
                </div>
            @endforeach
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

Returned HTML from controller

"
\n
\n
\n
\n 1\n <\/div>\n
\n 2\n <\/div>\n
\n 3\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/div>"

It definitely looks like its breaking somewhere to me. Again I am using this exact same method elsewhere in my application and its working fine, this is giving me a headache!

via Chebli Mohamed