Perth Leads Australia in Cracking Down on Duplicate Property Listing Images — But Lags Behind Singapore and Amsterdam

Perth's property market is drowning in duplicate listing images. Real estate portals serving the city are carrying thousands of rental and sales advertisements that reuse photographs across multiple listings — sometimes for properties that have already been leased, demolished, or substantially altered — leaving prospective tenants and buyers making decisions based on images that bear little resemblance to reality.

The problem has sharpened dramatically since 2024, when WA's population growth accelerated off the back of AUKUS-related defence workforce arrivals at HMAS Stirling in Rockingham, mining contractor relocations to suburbs like Balcatta and Osborne Park, and a steady inflow of skilled migrants. Real Estate Institute of Western Australia data from earlier this year showed Perth's rental vacancy rate sitting below two per cent — a figure that compresses decision-making timelines and makes renters less likely to question whether a listing photo is current or fabricated.

What Perth Is Actually Doing About It

The Real Estate Institute of Western Australia introduced updated listing integrity guidelines in late 2025 requiring member agencies to timestamp all property photographs at upload and to retire images from active listings within 30 days of a property being leased or sold. Compliance, however, is voluntary for non-members, and a significant slice of Perth's short-stay and private rental market — particularly listings funnelled through platforms operating out of Subiaco and the Perth CBD's St Georges Terrace office corridor — falls outside that framework entirely.

Consumer Protection WA, a division of the Department of Energy, Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety, handles formal complaints when duplicate or misleading listing images constitute a breach of the Australian Consumer Law. The agency processed a notable volume of property-related image complaints in the 2024–25 financial year, though specific figures have not been publicly released. Penalties under the ACL for misleading conduct can reach $50,000 for individuals and $500,000 for corporations — but prosecutions in this specific category remain rare.

The City of Perth's planning and development portal, which handles a portion of commercial and short-stay listing approvals in the CBD precinct, does not currently cross-reference listing images against planning approval photographs, a gap that advocacy groups including Shelter WA have flagged in submissions to the state government's ongoing housing affordability review.

How Perth Compares With Cities Facing the Same Pressure

Singapore's Urban Redevelopment Authority mandates that all residential listings on approved portals carry a unique property identifier linked to a government land title record. Images uploaded without a matching identifier are automatically suppressed. The system, operational since January 2024, reduced duplicate listing complaints on PropertyGuru's Singapore platform by a reported 67 per cent within its first six months, according to the URA's published programme review.

Amsterdam went further in March 2025, requiring landlords listing on Funda — the Netherlands' dominant property portal — to submit a verified floor plan alongside photographs before a listing goes live. The Dutch government's Huurcommissie, the national rent tribunal, can now reject appeals that are based on listings later found to contain unverified images.

Vancouver's approach sits closer to Perth's: industry-led, with the Real Estate Council of British Columbia issuing 2025 guidelines that parallel REIWA's but carry similarly patchy enforcement. Auckland, facing a comparable post-migration housing crunch, has no dedicated regulatory framework at all — a point New Zealand housing advocates raised at a February 2026 parliamentary select committee hearing.

Perth, by that measure, is ahead of Auckland and Vancouver but well behind Singapore and Amsterdam. The gap matters most in suburbs where competition for rentals is most acute — Northbridge, Victoria Park, and the Stirling corridor near Innaloo, where turnover is high and prospective tenants routinely make enquiries without inspecting in person.

The WA state government's housing affordability task force is expected to present recommendations to the Cook government before the end of the third quarter of 2026. Consumer advocates are pushing for any new framework to include mandatory image-dating on all listings above a threshold weekly rent — currently proposed at $350 per week — and automatic delisting triggers once a property's status changes in the Landgate title register. Whether that makes it into the final package will depend heavily on what the real estate industry lobby accepts at the negotiating table.