Perth Councils and Developers Scramble to Fix Duplicate Image Problem Swamping Property Listings This Week

Real estate agencies across Perth's northern and southern corridors spent much of this week pulling and replacing hundreds of property listing images after a technical fault caused duplicate photographs to propagate across major online portals, muddying search results and frustrating buyers already struggling to find homes in a market where vacancy rates sit near record lows.

The problem matters now because Perth's housing crunch has pushed the median house price above $800,000 — a level that concentrates buyer attention on online platforms almost exclusively. When listings display the same photograph three or four times in a row, or show images pulled from a previous listing at the same address, buyers lose confidence in whether a property is correctly represented. That erodes trust at exactly the wrong moment, with open-home season restarting after the Queen's Birthday long weekend.

Where the Damage Has Been Most Visible

Agencies operating in Subiaco, Osborne Park and along the Stirling Highway corridor — high-turnover suburban strips that feed much of the city's mid-range rental and purchase market — reported the greatest concentration of affected listings. The Real Estate Institute of Western Australia, based on Havelock Street in West Perth, fielded multiple member inquiries on Wednesday and Thursday about whether the duplication issue constituted a breach of WA's property advertising standards under the Real Estate and Business Agents Act 1978.

At least two agencies with offices in Leederville and Mount Hawthorn temporarily suspended new listing uploads on Thursday morning while their software vendors investigated the root cause. Metronet corridor suburbs including Morley and Bayswater were also affected — awkward timing given the state government has been pushing those areas heavily as growth corridors tied to the new Morley-Ellenbrook Line, which opened its Morley station late last year.

The technical glitch appears tied to a bulk image-upload function used by several national listing platforms. When agents upload a photo set and then make a minor edit — correcting a price or a land-size figure — the platform's cache appears to duplicate the original image set rather than replace it. The result is listings that scroll through the same kitchen photograph six times before reaching the floor plan.

What Agents Are Doing Right Now

The short-term fix is manual: agents are logging into back-end dashboards, deleting duplicate image files one by one, and re-uploading curated sets. For a large Subiaco agency handling 40 or 50 active listings, that is a full day of administrative work that was not budgeted for. Several principal licensees contacted their professional indemnity insurers this week to clarify whether misrepresentation claims could arise if a buyer attended an open home based on images that turned out to belong to a neighbouring property listed at the same address in a previous financial year.

The City of Stirling's planning communications team confirmed it had received queries from local buyers asking whether council records could be used to verify which photographs were accurate for properties in suburbs like Balga and Hamersley, where older homes are being marketed alongside significant renovation histories. Council records, while public, do not routinely include photographic archives, so they offer limited help.

For buyers, the practical advice is straightforward: cross-reference any listing that shows repeated images against the property's RP Data or Landgate title history, both of which can be accessed for modest fees through licensed agents. Landgate's online portal, which covers all WA titles and recent sales, is the authoritative record. Buyers attending opens in Bayswater, Morley or Stirling this weekend should also ask agents directly which photographs were taken in the current listing cycle — and request a date-stamp if any doubt exists.

Platform vendors have not publicly disclosed a timeline for a permanent fix, but agents who spoke to The Daily Perth on background said they expected a patched update to roll out within days. Until then, Perth's already-stressed property market is running on manual workarounds and a fair amount of goodwill.