Perth's Property Listings Are Drowning in Duplicate Photos — Here's How the City Stacks Up Against Singapore and Toronto

Perth's residential property market is generating listings at a pace the city hasn't seen in years, and the volume is exposing a persistent, unglamorous problem: duplicate images are appearing across multiple listings on major platforms, confusing buyers and inflating apparent stock levels at a time when every available home counts.

The problem is not trivial. Across REIWA-listed properties in the inner northern corridor — suburbs like Inglewood, Mount Lawley and Yokine — duplicate listing photographs have been identified on both realestate.com.au and domain.com.au, where a single property photograph is reused across stale and active listings simultaneously. For a buyer in mid-2026 trying to navigate a market where median house prices in some Perth suburbs have shifted significantly over the past 18 months, a duplicated image attached to an outdated listing can mean the difference between acting quickly and missing a sale entirely.

Why Perth's Housing Surge Makes This Worse

The WA government's Metronet expansion has concentrated new development activity along the Morley-Ellenbrook Line and Thornlie-Cockburn Link corridors. Developers marketing off-the-plan townhouses in Ellenbrook and Canning Vale have been among the worst offenders flagged internally by platform moderators, according to publicly available commentary on property industry forums. A single project photographed at different stages of construction can accumulate a library of near-identical images that agents, often working across multiple listings simultaneously, reuse without systematic checks.

Perth's immigration-driven demand spike — the city's population grew by roughly 60,000 people in the 2024-25 financial year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics — means the search volume hitting these platforms is higher than at any point since the mining boom. Duplicate images don't just waste a buyer's time. They skew algorithmic ranking systems that major portals use to surface listings, potentially burying legitimate new stock beneath ghost duplicates.

Compare that to Singapore, where the Urban Redevelopment Authority mandates that all residential listings submitted through its integrated property information platform carry a unique project reference code linked to approved floor plans. Duplicate images trigger an automatic flag before the listing goes live. Toronto's Canadian Real Estate Association operates a similarly structured MLS system with hash-based image deduplication built into its upload workflow since 2022. Perth has no equivalent regulatory framework. REIWA, the peak body for WA real estate agents, offers guidelines on listing standards but does not currently operate automated image-matching at the point of upload.

What Platforms and Agents Are Doing About It

Realestate.com.au has publicly acknowledged it uses image-recognition technology to detect and flag suspected duplicates, though the system operates reactively rather than as a hard gate. Agents retain the ability to publish listings before a flag is resolved. In practical terms, that means a buyer scrolling listings from a Northbridge apartment or a house in Scarborough on a Saturday morning may encounter the same photograph three times across properties that are not the same home.

The City of Perth's own online property and development portal, which lists council-approved development applications in the CBD and Northbridge precinct, does not carry photographs at all — sidestepping the problem entirely but offering buyers no visual reference for approved projects near them.

Property data firm CoreLogic, which supplies valuation data used by major Australian banks, has expanded its duplicate-detection toolset for lenders since 2023, but that operates on the valuation side of the transaction, not the consumer-facing search experience.

For buyers in Perth right now, the most practical defence is cross-referencing street addresses directly rather than relying on thumbnail images. Searching by lot number on Landgate's online portal — the WA Land Information Authority's public-facing mapping service — confirms title boundaries and ownership history independent of what any listing photograph shows. Buyers using a buyer's agent, a service that has grown sharply in Perth since 2024 as competition tightened, typically have that cross-check done as a matter of course. For those going it alone, Landgate remains the most reliable starting point before committing to an inspection.