Perth Councils and Property Managers Race to Purge Duplicate Listing Images After State Audit Flags Compliance Gaps

Perth's real estate sector is scrambling to audit and remove duplicate images from property listings and public land registers after a compliance review flagged widespread data quality problems across Western Australia's digital planning and property databases. The push, which accelerated this week, affects listings held on platforms linked to Landgate — the state's land information authority based in Midland — as well as council-managed development application portals.

The issue is not trivial. Duplicate imagery in property records creates legal exposure for agencies, muddies valuations, and has caused delays in settlement processing at the Landgate office on The Esplanade in Midland. Title searches that should take hours have, in some cases, stretched to days when conflicting image records trigger manual review flags inside the system. With Perth's property market still absorbing record immigration-driven demand and Metronet corridor suburbs like Ellenbrook and Morley seeing rapid subdivision activity, clean data is not an administrative nicety — it is a functional requirement.

What Triggered the Clean-Up Push

The immediate catalyst was a broader digital records audit that ran through June 2026, timed alongside the state government's push to streamline development approvals under the Planning and Development Amendment Act. Real estate institutes and conveyancing firms across the Perth CBD and inner suburbs were notified during the last week of June that records containing duplicate or replacement images — particularly site photographs uploaded more than once under different file names — needed to be resolved before July 18. That deadline is now less than two weeks away.

The Real Estate Institute of Western Australia, headquartered on Havelock Street in West Perth, has been fielding calls from member agencies asking how to identify duplicates within their own listing management systems. The problem is partly technical: several agencies migrated to new content management platforms over the past 18 months, and bulk data transfers during those migrations copied image files multiple times without triggering deduplication protocols. A mid-tier agency in Subiaco with roughly 400 active listings reportedly found more than 1,200 image files requiring manual review after running a deduplication scan this week.

City of Stirling and City of Swan — two of Perth's largest local government areas by population — have both confirmed they are reviewing images attached to development applications lodged through the state's online planning portal. Both councils have active pipelines of applications tied to Metronet corridor precincts, and duplicated attachments have the potential to delay assessment timelines if they trigger automated integrity checks. The City of Stirling's planning directorate covers suburbs from Scarborough to Balga, where medium-density rezoning work is ongoing.

Practical Steps for Agents and Owners

For individual property owners and vendors, the immediate practical advice from conveyancers is straightforward: ask your selling agent to run a file audit on any active listing before the July 18 deadline. Sellers who have updated property photos during a campaign — a common practice when a home sits on the market for more than four weeks — are most at risk of having duplicate images lodged against their title record in the Landgate system.

The cost of remediation is not enormous. Conveyancing firms in the Perth CBD are quoting between $150 and $300 to conduct a targeted image-record check and submit a correction request to Landgate, depending on the complexity of the title history. For properties in Ellenbrook or the Yanchep growth corridor, where land titles are newer and records are more straightforward, the process is typically faster.

For agencies, the workload is heavier. Larger offices with multiple branch teams — particularly those along the Stirling Highway corridor from Claremont to North Fremantle — are assigning administrative staff to full-time image audits until the deadline passes. Some have engaged third-party digital asset management contractors to automate the deduplication process.

Landgate has indicated it will publish updated guidance on its website before the end of this week, including a step-by-step process for lodging image replacement requests online. Agencies and councils that miss the July 18 date face the prospect of having affected records flagged as non-compliant, which can delay any subsequent dealings on those titles.