Perth Councils and Developers Race to Fix Duplicate Image Problem Swamping Online Property Listings

Planning authorities across metropolitan Perth are scrambling to address a months-long blowout in duplicate images fouling digital property and development records, with the problem hitting peak severity this week as mid-year housing approvals surge through the system. The City of Stirling and the City of Wanneroo — two of the state's busiest local governments for development applications — confirmed staff have been manually auditing image libraries after automated uploads began duplicating site photographs at a rate that backlogged some files by weeks.

The timing matters. Western Australia's housing market is under pressure from sustained immigration demand and AUKUS-related workforce movement into the northern suburbs near HMAS Stirling on Garden Island. Conveyancers and buyers' agents working out of offices along Hay Street and St Georges Terrace say the image errors are slowing due-diligence searches on properties from Balga to Butler, compounding already-tight settlement timelines in a market where median house prices have climbed sharply over the past two years.

What Went Wrong and Where

The problem traces back to a software update rolled out across several council planning portals in late April, when a batch-upload function designed to streamline the intake of development application photos began saving every image twice — sometimes three times — to backend servers. The Real Estate Institute of Western Australia has flagged the flow-on effects for members, noting that data syndicated from council records to commercial listing platforms like REIWA.com carries the duplicates downstream, inflating file sizes and in some cases displaying the wrong site photo against the wrong lot number.

The City of Joondalup, which processed more than 4,200 development applications in the 2024-25 financial year according to its published annual report, is understood to be among councils running cleanup scripts this week. Staff at the Boas Avenue civic centre in Joondalup have been cross-referencing application numbers against uploaded image metadata to identify and remove ghost files. The City of Swan, covering growth corridors from Midland through to Ellenbrook, is taking a similar approach, prioritising subdivisions where land titles are in the final stages of registration with Landgate, the state's land information authority based in Midland.

Landgate itself issued a notice to licensed settlement agents on July 1 advising them to verify all site imagery independently before relying on digital records for settlements due in July and August. The notice did not quantify the total number of affected records but described the problem as affecting multiple contributing data sources across the metropolitan region.

The Fix, and What Buyers Should Do Now

The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage has been working with council IT teams since mid-June to patch the upload function at the source. A department spokesperson — whose statements were published in the July 1 Landgate notice — confirmed a corrected version of the batch-upload module was pushed to participating councils on July 3. The patch prevents new duplicates from being generated but does not automatically remove those already in the system, meaning manual remediation work will continue for several more weeks.

For buyers and sellers currently mid-transaction, the practical advice from the state's settlement industry is straightforward: request a fresh, dated site inspection photograph directly from the selling agent or vendor before signing off on anything that relies on a digital image to confirm property condition or lot boundaries. Buyers' agents operating in the Scarborough and Doubleview markets — where unit developments have driven high volumes of planning applications — say the duplicate issue has been most disruptive for strata title properties, where individual lot photographs are routinely referenced in disclosure statements.

The WA government's Metronet expansion is adding another layer of complexity. Development application volumes along the Yanchep rail extension corridor jumped after construction milestones were confirmed earlier this year, and those applications are heavily image-dependent given the number of greenfield sites involved. Council staff and industry groups expect the cleanup to be substantially complete by the end of July, though anyone relying on digital planning records before then would be wise to verify offline.