Perth Councils and Property Firms Race to Fix Duplicate Image Problem This Week

Property listing platforms and local government planning portals across Perth spent much of this week scrambling to audit and replace thousands of duplicated images that had accumulated in their databases, a problem that has quietly compounded as housing demand and development applications surged through 2025 and into 2026.

The issue matters now because Western Australia's housing market remains under intense pressure. The state's population has grown sharply on the back of immigration linked to resources sector demand and AUKUS-related defence workforce expansion, driving a surge in both rental listings and development applications lodged with councils from Joondalup in the north to Rockingham in the south. When duplicate or mismatched images attach themselves to planning submissions or property listings, the downstream effect is real: applications get flagged for resubmission, buyers receive incorrect property photographs, and council assessment timelines blow out.

Where the Problem Is Concentrated

Two organisations have been most publicly caught up in the clean-up effort this week. The City of Stirling — which covers suburbs including Scarborough, Inglewood and Mirrabooka — confirmed it had identified duplicate image files attached to planning portal submissions lodged through the state government's ePlanning system. The City of Swan, which is processing a high volume of greenfield development applications tied to the Metronet Ellenbrook Line corridor, has also been working through a similar backlog in its own online lodgement system.

Real estate technology providers servicing agencies along the William Street and St Georges Terrace office strips have been in direct contact with portal administrators this week. The core technical cause, according to documentation circulating among industry users, is that automated upload systems designed to handle high-volume listing activity began generating duplicate file identifiers when servers were scaled up in late 2025 to cope with listing volumes. Rather than overwriting duplicates, the system retained both copies, attaching whichever image file loaded first to the relevant record — not necessarily the correct one.

For prospective buyers browsing listings on platforms that draw data from the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia's shared data feed, the practical result has been property photographs appearing on the wrong listings — a Balga duplex showing the streetscape of a Claremont townhouse, for instance, or a Midland industrial shed carrying the hero image of a Subiaco apartment. Agents working out of offices in the inner northern suburbs reported fielding calls this week from confused buyers who had driven to inspections expecting a property that looked nothing like what they found.

The Scale and What Comes Next

Precise figures on the total number of affected records have not been released publicly. However, industry data from the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia, published in its June 2026 market update, showed that more than 14,800 new residential listings were added to the Perth market in the three months to June 30 — the highest quarterly volume since comparable records began. At that pace of throughput, even a small percentage rate of duplicate-image error translates into hundreds of individual listing problems.

The WA Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage, which administers the ePlanning portal used by local governments statewide, has not issued a public statement on the matter as of Saturday morning. The City of Stirling's planning team began a manual audit of submissions received between March and June 2026. The City of Swan indicated it expects its review to be completed before the end of July, prioritising applications within 500 metres of proposed Metronet station precincts.

For property buyers and applicants, the immediate practical advice from agents and planning consultants is to verify that every image attached to a listing or submission matches the property address before proceeding to inspection or assessment. Anyone who lodged a planning application through an ePlanning portal between February and June 2026 is being encouraged to log back into the system and confirm that supporting photographs are correctly labelled. Agents have also been asked by platform administrators to re-upload hero images manually rather than relying on automated bulk-upload tools until the underlying file-identification fix is deployed — a patch that administrators say is expected to go live in mid-July.