Perth's Duplicate Image Problem: What Happens Next and the Key Decisions Ahead

Western Australia's land and property data agencies are facing a reckoning over duplicate image records embedded across multiple government and commercial databases, with a state government review due to report back by September 30 confirming the problem is larger than previously acknowledged. The Landgate registry alone has flagged more than 14,000 property files containing duplicate or conflicting image attachments since a preliminary audit began in March.

The issue matters now because three separate pressures have collided at once. Perth's housing market is moving at a pace that leaves almost no tolerance for administrative error — median house prices in the metropolitan area hit $785,000 in the June quarter, according to REIWA data, and settlement timelines have compressed to as few as 21 days on some Baldivis and Ellenbrook transactions. At the same time, the Cook government's push to digitise planning approvals under the Planning Reform Action Plan means more decisions are being made off digital records, not physical files. A duplicate image attached to the wrong lot can stall a building permit or trigger a false heritage flag.

Where the Problem Is Concentrated

Landgate's offices in Midland are the operational nerve centre for WA's property titling system, and staff there have been working through a backlog of flagged files since the audit began. The City of Swan and the City of Stirling have both confirmed to The Daily Perth they received formal notifications in May identifying mismatched aerial imagery attached to development application records lodged through the state's ePlanning portal. Stirling, which covers suburbs from Doubleview to Balcatta, said 63 applications had been affected, though none resulted in an incorrect approval.

The problem extends beyond council boundaries. The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage — which operates from its Optima Centre offices on Havelock Street in West Perth — uses image assets drawn from shared repositories maintained by both Landgate and the state's spatial data infrastructure under Shared Location Information Platform, known as SLIP. When a duplicate image propagates through SLIP, it can appear simultaneously in council GIS systems, the Dial Before You Dig network, and heritage overlays maintained by the State Heritage Office on Barrack Street.

Landgate chief executive Anne Driscoll told a parliamentary estimates hearing on June 18 that the agency had identified the root cause as a 2024 migration of legacy TIFF files into a new cloud storage environment, during which a metadata-matching error created approximately 9,400 duplicated image references. The fix requires manual verification of each affected record — automated resolution has a confirmed error rate too high to rely on for title documents.

Decisions That Will Shape the Fix

Three choices now sit with the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage and Treasury, and how they are resolved will determine whether this is resolved before the spring property season or drags into 2027. First, the government must decide whether to fund a temporary specialist contractor workforce to clear the backlog, at an estimated cost of $2.3 million, or absorb the work into existing Landgate staffing over a longer timeline. Second, agencies need to settle on a single authoritative image repository — the current arrangement, where Landgate and SLIP maintain parallel but unsynchronised stores, is the structural reason the duplication occurred. Third, the ePlanning portal's document validation rules need updating so duplicate file hashes are rejected at the point of upload rather than flagged post-lodgement.

For property buyers, sellers and builders dealing with affected records right now, the practical advice from the Real Estate Institute of WA is straightforward: request a fresh title search and a current site plan directly from Landgate rather than relying on images embedded in an agent's listing or a council's online mapping tool. The Landgate customer centre on Forrest Place in the CBD can process priority title searches within 24 hours for a $34.10 fee. Settlement agents in suburbs like Joondalup and Cannington that have seen high transaction volumes this year have reportedly been recommending clients do this as standard practice since May.

The September 30 review deadline is tight. If the Cook government's budget bid for the contractor workforce is approved in the mid-year review — expected in late October — the backlog clearance could finish by February 2027. If it is not funded, Landgate has indicated the manual verification process will not be complete until at least mid-2027, well into the next state budget cycle and the next election conversation.