Perth Agencies Scramble to Purge Duplicate Images From Public Records This Week

Several Perth metropolitan councils and at least one state government agency began urgent audits this week after duplicate and incorrectly matched images were found embedded in public-facing records, property listings and digital heritage archives. The problem — long considered a back-office nuisance — has taken on fresh urgency as WA's housing market tightens and more property transactions move through fully digital approval pipelines.

The immediate trigger was a data integrity review at Landgate, the state's land information authority based in Midland, which identified a category of records where property photographs had been duplicated or cross-matched to incorrect lot numbers. Landgate manages the authoritative spatial data underpinning property valuations, strata titles and the Metronet corridor planning that the Cook government has treated as a centrepiece of its urban infill strategy. Bad image metadata in that environment is not a cosmetic problem — it can delay settlement, confuse valuers and create disputes in the Landgate titles system that take weeks to unwind.

Where the Problem Is Surfacing Locally

The City of Stirling and the City of Bayswater — two councils sitting directly along the Metronet Morley–Ellenbrook Line corridor — confirmed this week they were cross-checking their development application portals after being alerted to the Landgate audit findings. Both councils have dramatically increased their volume of digitally lodged development applications since 2024, when the state government pushed local governments toward the single ePlanning portal as part of WA's broader digital infrastructure agenda.

The Heritage Council of WA, which maintains the State Register of Heritage Places and holds photographic documentation for properties across the metropolitan area including significant sites in Fremantle and Guildford, is also understood to be reviewing image records. When photographs are duplicated or tagged to the wrong entry in a heritage database, planning officers can inadvertently assess a building against the wrong structural photographs — a material error in any conservation works approval process.

Real estate is feeling it too. The Real Estate Institute of Western Australia has been fielding calls from member agencies this week, particularly those operating along the Scarborough Beach Road and Beaufort Street corridors, where a high volume of strata unit listings share similar floor plans and interiors. Duplicate listing images — sometimes the result of agents copying a previous listing rather than uploading fresh photography — have been appearing as mismatched to different addresses inside aggregator platforms, creating confusion for buyers in a market where the median Perth house price crossed $800,000 earlier this year.

Why Fixing It Is Harder Than It Sounds

Duplicate image replacement is technically straightforward in isolation. The complication in WA's case is that multiple systems — Landgate's SLIP (Shared Location Information Platform), council development portals, the heritage register and private real estate aggregators — do not share a common image identifier standard. A photograph uploaded to one system can be ingested, re-compressed and re-tagged by another, stripping the original metadata that would flag it as already existing elsewhere in the chain.

The WA Government's Digital Strategy, released in 2023, identified interoperability between agencies as a priority, but image metadata standards were not among the specific technical mandates included in that document. That gap is now visible in practice.

For property buyers, the practical advice from conveyancers operating out of firms in West Perth and Subiaco this week is straightforward: request a fresh title search and ask your agent to confirm that listing photographs were taken specifically for the current listing. Do not assume photographs on a portal entry correspond to the actual property without verification, particularly for strata units in high-density suburbs like Northbridge, Victoria Park or Rivervale where building stock is visually similar.

Landgate is expected to publish a timeline for completing its image audit before the end of July. The City of Stirling has indicated it will provide an update to its elected members at the next ordinary council meeting. For agencies and councils still using legacy document management systems, the episode is a pointed reminder that the push toward digital-first planning carries its own category of data hygiene risk — one that Perth is working through in real time.