Perth Councils and Developers Scramble to Fix Duplicate Image Problem Hitting Property Listings This Week

Property listings across metropolitan Perth have been hit this week by a surge of duplicate and incorrectly matched images, creating headaches for buyers, sellers and development applicants at one of the busiest moments in the city's housing market in years. The problem — traced to a backend indexing fault affecting multiple real estate data platforms — has forced agencies in Subiaco, Joondalup and the eastern suburbs to manually audit hundreds of listings since Monday.

The timing is lousy. Perth's housing market is under pressure from a combination of immigration-driven demand, Metronet corridor development activity and a state government push to accelerate infill approvals. Any friction in the listings and planning portal ecosystem slows down transactions that buyers and developers are already racing to complete before winter stock dries up further.

What Went Wrong and Where

The fault appears to have originated in a syndication feed used by several agencies to push listing photographs to the major portals. Offices along Rokeby Road in Subiaco and at the Joondalup City Centre precinct both reported that property photographs were appearing against the wrong addresses — in some cases showing interior shots of a Bassendean townhouse attached to a Canning Vale land release listing. The City of Swan's online development application tracker, which embeds applicant-supplied imagery, also showed mismatched site photographs on at least a dozen lodgements visible on the public portal as of Thursday morning.

The Real Estate Institute of Western Australia has been fielding calls from member agencies about the problem since Tuesday. No formal advisory had been published by the institute as of Friday afternoon, though member communications are understood to be in preparation. The State Administrative Tribunal, which handles planning and strata disputes, uses separately hosted imagery systems and confirmed its portal was unaffected.

For buyers relying on digital-only inspections — a practice that surged post-pandemic and has not fully receded — the duplicate images create real legal exposure. A purchaser who relies on incorrect photographs when making an offer may later claim misrepresentation, a scenario conveyancers in Perth's northern suburbs say they have seen litigated before under the Australian Consumer Law.

Data Portals and Planning Pipelines Feel the Pinch

Perth's housing pipeline makes this more than a nuisance. The Western Australian Planning Commission reported in its most recent quarterly data that more than 14,000 residential lots were moving through various approvals stages across the metropolitan region. Any delay in the digital documentation trail — including site photographs required under the Planning and Development (Local Planning Schemes) Regulations 2015 — can push approval timelines past the next scheduled panel meeting, adding six to eight weeks to a project's clock.

Agencies most exposed tend to be those handling high-volume land releases in growth corridors including Ellenbrook, Brabham and the Eglinton coastal estate north of Yanchep, where image libraries for staged releases run to hundreds of files and a syndication error can cascade quickly. Several project marketing firms operating out of offices on St Georges Terrace confirmed they had pulled listings temporarily on Wednesday to cross-check imagery before republishing.

The cost of manual audits is not trivial. Industry estimates for a full image reconciliation across a 50-listing portfolio run to several hundred dollars in staff hours alone, and agencies managing more than 200 active listings face a longer process.

For home sellers caught mid-campaign, the advice from property managers this week has been straightforward: log into your agent's portal directly and confirm the images attached to your listing address before any scheduled open home. Buyers should request that agents provide a written confirmation of image accuracy alongside any offer documentation. Development applicants lodging through the City of Perth's eDevelopment system or equivalent local government platforms should upload images as individually labelled files — not batch uploads — until the syndication fault is resolved. A fix to the underlying feed is expected to be deployed over the weekend, though full reindexing of affected listings may take until early next week to complete.