Perth Residents Speak Out as Duplicate Property Images Leave Buyers and Renters in the Dark

Perth renters and buyers are raising alarms over a practice that has quietly worsened as the city's housing market tightened: property listings appearing online with duplicate, outdated, or mismatched photographs that bear little resemblance to the actual homes on offer. Community feedback gathered at housing information sessions run by Shelter WA and the Tenants WA advice line this quarter points to a pattern affecting suburbs from Armadale to Scarborough.

The issue has sharpened in 2026 because Perth's vacancy rate for rental properties sat below one per cent for much of the first half of the year, according to Real Estate Institute of Western Australia data released in June. When competition is that fierce, prospective tenants and buyers are booking inspections — sometimes taking half-days off work — based on photos that turn out to show a different unit, an older fit-out, or a completely different street. The cost, in time and transport, adds up fast.

At a Tenants WA drop-in session held at the Mirrabooka Square community room on 18 June, multiple attendees described turning up to inspections in the northern suburbs only to find properties that looked nothing like their online listings. One attendee described driving from Balga to a listed property in Girrawheen and discovering the photographs shown on the major portal were of a renovated version of the unit rented out two years earlier. The current unit still had the original 1980s kitchen. She had arranged childcare to attend. She did not get the property.

What's Behind the Problem

Real estate portals used across Western Australia — including realestate.com.au and Domain — allow agencies to upload image sets that can be reused across multiple listings or carried forward from previous tenancies. There is no mandatory requirement under WA's current tenancy framework for photographs to be dated or verified as current at the time of each new listing. Consumer Protection WA, which sits within the Department of Energy, Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety, has the authority to investigate misleading conduct under the Fair Trading Act 2010, but complaints specifically about property image accuracy have historically been treated as a low-priority category.

A resident who attended a Shelter WA housing forum at the Leederville Town Hall in May described a similar experience in the Highgate rental market, where a one-bedroom flat was advertised with photos of freshly painted walls and new flooring. The walls, she said, were marked and the floors were original timber in poor condition. She had pre-approved finance ready and lost a week of searching. Shelter WA's public advocacy documents note that low-income households and those relocating from interstate — a demographic that has grown sharply with AUKUS-related defence industry relocations to the Henderson and Stirling Naval Base corridors — are disproportionately exposed to this problem because they often cannot visit in person before committing.

What Residents and Advocates Want Done

Attendees at both the Mirrabooka and Leederville sessions landed on similar requests. They want a mandatory photograph-date disclosure on every listing — something as simple as a caption showing the month and year the image was taken. Several pointed to New South Wales, where Consumer Affairs guidance issued in early 2025 specifically flagged image currency as a component of misleading advertising in residential tenancy, as a template WA could follow.

Tenants WA's public materials recommend that prospective renters request written confirmation from the agent that listing photographs were taken within the current tenancy period, or that the property is presented in substantially the same condition as depicted. That advice is practically useful but depends entirely on the agent responding and on the applicant having enough leverage to push back — a difficult ask when a Scarborough one-bedroom is drawing 40 applications in a weekend.

Consumer Protection WA accepts complaints online at dmirs.wa.gov.au and can compel traders to substantiate advertising claims. Anyone who attended an inspection where the property materially differed from its online listing is encouraged to lodge a formal complaint, citing the specific listing URL, the inspection date, and a written description of the discrepancy. The more complaints on file, advocates say, the stronger the case for a regulatory update before the next state budget cycle, which WA Treasury has scheduled for May 2027.