Perth Councils and State Agencies Race to Fix Duplicate Image Problem Swamping Property and Planning Portals

Duplicate images have been piling up inside Western Australia's online planning and property systems for the better part of a fortnight, and as of this week the problem remains only partially resolved. The issue — triggered by a bulk data migration carried out in late June — has seen the same document scans, site photographs and cadastral maps appearing multiple times across several government-facing portals, including records linked to the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage and local council development-tracking systems.

The timing is lousy. Perth's property market is running hot on the back of continued immigration-driven housing demand and a construction pipeline swollen by Metronet corridor projects stretching from Yanchep in the north to Byford in the south-east. Accurate digital records underpin almost every stage of that process, from subdivision approval to title transfer. When the same image turns up six times inside a DA submission, assessors either flag the application for manual review or — in some cases uncovered this week — miss the underlying document entirely because it is buried in duplicates.

What Actually Happened This Week

The City of Stirling confirmed on Thursday that its online development application portal, which handles submissions for suburbs including Balga, Mirrabooka and Scarborough, had been affected since approximately June 22. Staff have been manually triaging files lodged after that date. The City of Wanneroo, which is processing a significant volume of new-lot applications tied to the Alkimos and Eglinton growth corridors, also flagged the duplication issue to its elected members at a briefing on Wednesday July 1.

The root cause, as best as has been established, sits in a server-side script used during a planned upgrade to the Landgate-connected document repository. When the migration tool re-indexed existing image files, it failed to check for pre-existing entries before writing new records, effectively stamping every affected file with between two and eight duplicate entries. The State Records Office of Western Australia, which maintains archival obligations for government image holdings under the State Records Act 2000, was briefed on the matter on July 2 according to a notice circulated to local government information managers.

Real estate agents working the upper-north corridor — particularly around Joondalup and Clarkson — say the duplicates have slowed automated contract-preparation tools that pull images directly from Landgate's property interest records. Settlement delays of two to three business days have been reported anecdotally by agencies, though the full scope across the metro area has not yet been formally quantified.

What Needs to Happen Before This Is Closed Out

A deduplication script is being tested in a staging environment, with a production rollout flagged for the week beginning July 7. The fix is designed to compare file hashes before deleting presumed duplicates — a safer approach than bulk deletion, which risks removing images that look identical but carry different metadata. Any file created after June 22 and before the fix goes live will need a secondary audit pass, which IT teams estimate could take up to 10 business days depending on the volume of affected records.

For property buyers and sellers with settlements due in the next two weeks, the practical advice from settlement agents is straightforward: request a manual title check through your conveyancer rather than relying solely on automated portal pulls, and build an extra two to three business days of buffer into any settlement date that falls before July 17. Development applicants who lodged through the City of Stirling or City of Wanneroo portals between June 22 and July 4 should contact the relevant council to confirm their supporting images were correctly indexed.

The episode underlines a broader vulnerability in WA's property administration infrastructure at precisely the moment demand is at its highest. With the state budget surplus funding new digital-government investment through the Digital Transformation Plan, agencies will be pressed to demonstrate that upgrade migrations include more robust deduplication checks from the outset. The July 7 rollout will be the first real test of whether the fix holds.