Perth's Construction Sector Confronts a Week of Costly Duplicate Image Mix-Ups

A pattern of duplicate image submissions inside Western Australia's digital planning portal caused at least a dozen development applications in the Perth metropolitan area to stall this week, according to industry practitioners who manage documentation for residential and commercial projects. The errors — where the same property photograph or site plan is uploaded multiple times under different file labels — have triggered automated rejection flags in the state's Development Assessment Panel system, pushing approvals past their statutory timeframes.

The issue landed with particular weight this week because the WA Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage is midway through a staged upgrade to its ePlanning portal, a rollout that began in March 2026. The upgrade introduced stricter file-matching algorithms designed to catch plagiarised or recycled supporting documents. Those same algorithms are now catching legitimate duplicate images submitted by mistake — an unintended consequence that several documentation consultants say they were not warned about ahead of the July 1 phase-three go-live date.

Where the Backlog Is Biting

The hold-ups are concentrated in two of Perth's fastest-growing corridors. In Ellenbrook, northeast of the city, three multi-dwelling applications lodged through the Swan Valley and Eastern Districts Joint Development Assessment Panel are sitting in a pending-correction queue as of Friday morning. In Eglinton, at the northern end of the Metronet coastal extension, a medium-density residential project on Neerabup Road submitted by a Joondalup-based drafting firm has been returned twice in seven days over image duplication flags. Both areas are under intense development pressure driven by the state's housing demand surge, which the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia has separately linked to continued interstate and overseas migration flows into the Perth market.

Fremantle is also affected. A heritage-sensitive mixed-use development near the West End precinct on Cliff Street received a correction notice on Tuesday after site elevation images were inadvertently duplicated across three separate PDF attachments. The developer's agent told colleagues at a Property Council of Australia WA networking event in West Perth on Thursday that the fix — recompiling and resubmitting the full documentation package — added an estimated five business days to an already tight programme.

What the Industry Is Doing About It

The WA planning department published a technical advisory bulletin on July 2 flagging the image-matching behaviour and advising applicants to audit submitted files before lodgement. The bulletin recommends using unique file names for each image asset and avoiding bulk exports from drawing software that generate sequential duplicates. It does not, however, offer to expedite correction reviews that were triggered by the algorithm's pre-bulletin behaviour — meaning projects caught in the gap between the July 1 launch and the July 2 advisory are effectively waiting in a standard corrections queue.

The Urban Development Institute of Australia WA division circulated the bulletin to members on Thursday alongside a request that affected members document their delays. The institute is understood to be compiling a formal submission to the department requesting retrospective fast-tracking for applications caught in the window. No timeline for that submission has been confirmed publicly.

For individual homeowners managing owner-builder applications through the City of Stirling or the City of Wanneroo — both among Perth's highest-volume councils for residential approvals — the practical advice from documentation specialists this week is straightforward: before submitting any application through the ePlanning portal, run every image file through a basic duplicate-checker tool, rename files with property address codes and submission dates, and avoid using smartphone photo exports that default to identical file metadata. Applications with five or more image attachments are most likely to trigger the algorithm.

The broader context is hard to ignore. Perth is processing a record volume of development applications against a backdrop of a state budget surplus that has funded accelerated Metronet construction and AUKUS-linked industrial precinct work near HMAS Stirling at Garden Island. Any bottleneck in the approvals pipeline — even a technical one — lands on a system already under pressure. The department has not publicly indicated whether it will pause the algorithm pending a review, but industry groups expect a clearer response early next week.