Perth's Duplicate Image Problem: How the City Stacks Up Against Singapore, Amsterdam and Toronto

Perth's property market is drowning in duplicate images. Across listings on platforms used by agencies operating from Subiaco to the Swan Valley, the same photographs of homes, development sites and rental properties are appearing under multiple addresses — sometimes simultaneously — creating confusion for buyers, inflating apparent stock levels, and frustrating the planning workflows of agencies including the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage on Victoria Avenue in the CBD.

The issue has sharpened in 2026 as WA's population growth, driven partly by AUKUS-related defence workforce expansion around HMAS Stirling at Garden Island and a sustained immigration intake, has pushed digital listing volumes to record highs. When the same four-bedroom photo set for a home in Baldivis appears on three separate listings — each with a different address — the market intelligence that buyers, renters and government planners rely on becomes unreliable. That is not a trivial problem in a city where the median house price passed $780,000 earlier this year according to Real Estate Institute of Western Australia figures.

What Other Cities Did First

Singapore confronted this problem in 2022, when the Urban Redevelopment Authority mandated that property portals operating in the city-state implement perceptual hashing — a technique that generates a digital fingerprint for each image and automatically flags or removes near-identical copies across listings. The Housing and Development Board, which manages the majority of Singapore's public housing stock, adopted the standard across its own resale portal within six months of the mandate taking effect.

Amsterdam followed a different path. The Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, responsible for heritage property data, partnered in 2023 with the Dutch listing platform Funda to run quarterly automated audits across its database, pulling duplicate image sets and requiring agencies to resubmit verified photography within 14 days. Toronto, dealing with a condo listing glut that saw some buildings represented by identical floor-plan renders on dozens of separate MLS entries, introduced a voluntary industry code through the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board in late 2024 that requires agencies to certify photo provenance before a listing goes live.

Perth has no equivalent policy in place. The Real Estate Institute of Western Australia's current listing standards, last substantively updated in 2021, address copyright and agent attribution but do not specifically require duplicate image detection before a property hits the market.

Local Efforts Gaining Traction

A handful of Perth-based agencies and technology firms are not waiting. Proptech startup Landchecker, which operates out of offices near the Cloisters Arcade on St Georges Terrace, has been piloting an image-deduplication layer for clients in the Stirling and Joondalup local government areas since March 2026. The company's approach uses open-source perceptual hashing libraries to cross-reference new listing images against a rolling database of previously published photographs — flagging matches before they go live rather than cleaning them up after the fact.

The City of Perth's own Smart City Office, which sits within the Council House complex on Hay Street, has flagged duplicate digital asset management as a line item in its 2026-27 technology procurement review, though no contract has been awarded as of the July sitting period. Meanwhile, Metronet corridor planning — particularly around the new Ellenbrook Line stations — is generating fresh volumes of aerial and site photography that planners say need cleaner cataloguing standards before the data becomes a long-term liability.

The practical stakes are high. A property investor comparing rental yield data across the Forrestfield or Redcliffe precincts, both of which sit adjacent to new Metronet stations, is working with numbers that are only as good as the underlying listing data. If 8 percent of listings in a suburb carry duplicated images — a conservative estimate based on audit rates reported from comparable markets — the apparent vacancy rate, average days on market, and median asking rent can all be skewed enough to affect investment decisions worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Industry observers expect REIWA to be pushed on a formal standard before the end of the 2026 calendar year, particularly as the WA government's broader digital-economy agenda — part of the state budget's technology infrastructure commitments — puts data quality in the spotlight. For now, Perth buyers and agents are advised to cross-check listing photographs manually using reverse image search tools, verify addresses against Landgate's online title records, and report suspected duplicate listings directly to the platform operator before proceeding to inspection.