Perth Councils and Developers Race to Fix Duplicate Image Problem Plaguing Digital Property Records This Week

Property records held by at least three Perth metropolitan councils contain duplicate and mismatched images — a problem that came into sharp focus this week after the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage flagged the issue ahead of a July 18 compliance review of the state's integrated land information system. The glitch affects development application portals, heritage overlays and subdivision records, and has already caused delays to at least a handful of building approvals in the inner suburbs.

The timing is awkward. WA is in the middle of one of its biggest construction booms in a decade, driven by immigration-fuelled housing demand and AUKUS-related infrastructure spending tied to HMAS Stirling on Garden Island. Any slowdown in the approval pipeline — even a bureaucratic one — ripples quickly through a building sector already stretched thin on labour and materials.

Where the Problem Is Hitting Hardest

The City of Stirling and the City of Swan have both confirmed internal audits are underway after duplicate site photographs and scanned plan sets were identified in their online development application portals. The City of Stirling's planning directorate began its review on Monday, targeting records lodged between January 2024 and June 2026 — a period that covers the bulk of applications processed through the updated Pathway system rolled out by the Western Australian Planning Commission. Swan's audit is focused on greenfield estates in the Ellenbrook and Brabham corridors, where subdivision activity has been especially heavy.

Landgate, the state's land information authority based in Midland, is coordinating the broader remediation effort. The agency manages the cadastral database that underpins everything from council rating records to mortgage valuations, and duplicate images embedded in that system can trigger downstream errors when third parties — banks, conveyancers, surveyors — pull official title documents. Landgate has asked affected local governments to submit corrected records by July 18 to avoid the errors propagating into the next scheduled database synchronisation.

The Real Estate Institute of Western Australia flagged the issue to its members in a bulletin earlier this week, warning that settlement agents handling properties in affected zones should independently verify site photographs attached to Form 1 disclosure statements before contracts are finalised. Several Cannington-based conveyancing firms told colleagues at a Western Australian Conveyancers Association meeting on Wednesday that they had already spotted mismatched images on two separate Balga properties, each showing photographs from an adjoining lot.

What Caused It and What Comes Next

The root cause appears to be a batch upload error during a system migration carried out in late 2024, when councils were transitioning to updated document management software. Metadata tagging that links a photograph to a specific lot number was not validated consistently during the transfer, meaning images were assigned to incorrect parcel identifiers. The problem went undetected for months because the images themselves are rarely cross-checked against lot boundaries by automated processes — that job falls to human planners reviewing individual applications.

The scale is still being quantified. Landgate has not yet published a total count of affected records, and individual councils are at different stages of their audits. What is clear is that the July 18 deadline gives agencies roughly two weeks to identify, flag and resubmit corrected entries — a tight window given that planning departments across Perth are already managing elevated workloads.

For homeowners and buyers, the practical advice from conveyancers this week is straightforward: if you are mid-transaction on a property in Stirling, Swan, or any other council area running an active audit, ask your settlement agent to pull the title documents directly from Landgate rather than relying on copies cached through third-party portals. Properties in the Balga, Girrawheen, Ellenbrook and Brabham areas have been identified as higher-risk zones this week, though the audit is ongoing. Anyone who has received a development approval since January 2024 and suspects their site photographs may be misaligned with their lot description can lodge a correction request through the relevant council's planning counter or via the WAPC's online Pathway portal before the remediation window closes on July 18.