Perth Councils and Developers Race to Purge Duplicate Property Images as New Listing Rules Bite

Real estate offices from Fremantle to Joondalup spent the first week of July scrambling to audit their online property listings after updated guidance from the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia reinforced expectations that duplicate and reused images must be removed or replaced before relisting. The push follows months of complaints from buyers and renters about misleading photographs recycled from previous sales appearing on current listings — a problem that intensified as Perth's rental vacancy rate stayed near record lows and new properties were turned over faster than agencies could update their marketing files.

The timing matters. Perth's housing market has faced extraordinary pressure from a surge in interstate and overseas arrivals connected to AUKUS defence contracts centred on HMAS Stirling at Garden Island, as well as Metronet construction workers concentrated in suburbs along the Yanchep and Ellenbrook rail corridors. Properties in areas like Alkimos and Ellenbrook are being listed, leased and relisted within weeks, creating conditions where an agency might unknowingly push a three-year-old floorplan photo — or a shot taken when the kitchen was still fitted with the previous owner's appliances — back into public view.

What Triggered the Cleanup This Week

The immediate trigger was a formal reminder circulated in late June by REIWA to member agencies, flagging that portal operators including realestate.com.au and Domain had updated their duplicate-content detection systems. Properties flagged by those systems risk being suppressed in search results — effectively invisible to buyers browsing online. For agencies operating in high-turnover suburbs like Baldivis in the City of Rockingham and Brabham in the City of Swan, a suppressed listing can mean the difference between a one-week and a six-week vacancy.

Several property management firms along St Georges Terrace in the Perth CBD confirmed this week they had assigned staff specifically to cross-check image libraries against active listings. The work is largely manual: staff pull each listing, compare the uploaded photographs against a master archive, and replace any image that appears more than once across different property addresses. For larger agencies managing hundreds of rentals simultaneously, that process can run to dozens of staff hours.

Perth's median house price was sitting above $870,000 in the June quarter, according to figures published by REIWA, with unit prices also climbing sharply in inner suburbs like Victoria Park and Bayswater. At those prices, buyers and their conveyancers are scrutinising listing materials more carefully than they would have five years ago — and duplicate or outdated images are increasingly being raised in pre-purchase negotiations as grounds to query a property's presented condition.

Local Government Portals Also Caught Up

The issue is not confined to private real estate. The City of Perth's planning and development portal, which publishes imagery for development applications in the CBD and inner suburbs, undertook a routine image audit in June after staff identified several duplicate photographs attached to separate DA submissions for sites along Murray Street and Wellington Street. The City confirmed the audit was completed before July 1, though the scope and findings of that review have not been made public.

For property buyers and renters, the practical advice from industry observers is straightforward: always request a fresh photo set dated within the current listing period, particularly for properties in high-churn suburbs north of the river. Ask the agent directly when the images were taken. If a listing shows a garden in full summer bloom in the middle of Perth's July winter, that is a signal the pictures are at minimum six months old. Buyers using a buyer's agent should specifically instruct them to verify image currency before any offer is tabled.

The broader compliance push is unlikely to ease quickly. Portal algorithms will continue tightening their duplicate-detection parameters, and with Perth's property market showing no sign of cooling through the second half of 2026, the volume of relisted properties — and the risk of recycled images slipping through — will remain high for agencies already stretched by workload.