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

Perth's rapid population growth has exposed a systemic weakness in the digital infrastructure underpinning the city's planning and property systems: duplicate images — repeated, mislabelled or wrongly assigned photographs clogging databases from Fremantle to the Swan Valley — are forcing agencies to burn staff hours on manual audits at the worst possible moment.

The problem surfaced publicly this week after the City of Stirling flagged to residents that its online development application portal was displaying incorrect site photographs for multiple properties along Scarborough Beach Road, a stretch currently under intense scrutiny because of active Metronet-related rezoning and medium-density infill proposals. Affected applications included sites near the Stirling train station precinct, where rezoning decisions carry significant financial consequences for landowners.

The immediate trigger matters. WA's housing crisis has pushed planning departments to process record volumes of development applications. The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage logged more than 14,000 development applications statewide in the 12 months to March 2026, according to figures published in the department's most recent annual report. With that volume comes image uploads running into the hundreds of thousands — street elevations, heritage photographs, environmental assessments — and the deduplication systems originally built for lower traffic loads are struggling to keep pace.

From Subiaco to Midland: Where the Errors Are Clustering

The duplication issue is not evenly spread. Planners and property professionals working in Perth's inner ring — Subiaco, Leederville and Victoria Park — have reported the most concentrated errors, largely because those suburbs have seen multiple overlapping rezoning rounds under the State Government's Housing Diversity Program. Each rezoning event generates a new round of mandatory photo documentation, and images uploaded under different application reference numbers are being pulled into shared asset libraries without robust deduplication checks.

The City of Bayswater's planning team sent internal guidance to staff in late June instructing officers to manually verify each image attachment before publishing decisions on its online tracker — a workaround, not a fix. Out in Midland, where the Midland Health Campus precinct is also generating significant planning activity tied to associated residential development, staff at the City of Swan have encountered similar mismatches when processing subdivision applications.

Private sector property platforms are not immune. Real estate listing aggregators operating through the Realestate.com.au and Domain feeds have both reported instances this week of Perth properties displaying photographs from entirely different addresses — in at least one documented case flagged by a Nedlands-based agency on Tuesday, a listing on Stirling Highway carried a lead image of a property in Balga. The mix-up was corrected within hours, but the incident circulated quickly among local property professionals.

What's Being Done, and What Comes Next

The State Government's Land Information Authority, Landgate, confirmed this week it is working through an audit of its property image repository, which underpins a range of downstream government and commercial data products. Landgate has not published a timeline for completing the audit, but the agency noted in a statement to industry partners that a software update to its image ingestion pipeline was scheduled for the week of July 14.

The City of Stirling has advised applicants and agents with active development applications to email its planning counter directly to confirm the correct images are attached to their files — a precaution that is sensible given the stakes. Applications in the Scarborough Beach Road and Gwelup corridors are among those recommended for manual verification.

For homeowners, real estate agents and developers submitting documentation through any Perth local government portal in the coming weeks, the practical advice is blunt: do not assume the image displayed on a published application is the one you uploaded. Screenshot your submission confirmation page, retain local copies of every image file with a date-stamped filename, and follow up with the relevant planning counter if an online decision notice looks wrong.

The deeper fix will require investment. Multiple local government IT managers have flagged that deduplication tooling capable of handling current volumes represents a capital cost many councils have not budgeted for in their 2025-26 financial year allocations. With WA's state budget recording a surplus, there is an argument for the State Government to consider shared digital infrastructure funding — but no formal proposal has yet been tabled.