Duplicate Images in Perth's Property Listings: What Officials, Experts and Key Figures Are Saying

Property listings across Perth's inner suburbs are increasingly being flagged for carrying duplicate or misattributed photographs — images recycled from other addresses, older builds, or entirely different postcodes — and the pressure to fix the problem is now coming from multiple directions at once.

The issue has surfaced publicly at a moment of acute sensitivity. With the WA housing market absorbing a surge in demand driven by immigration growth and AUKUS-related defence worker relocations to the Stirling Naval Base corridor, accurate property imagery has taken on a practical weight it rarely carried before. Buyers relocating from interstate or overseas are frequently making initial assessments — and sometimes offers — based entirely on digital listings before physically inspecting a home.

Where the Problem Is Showing Up

Complaints have been most concentrated in fast-moving precincts including Alkimos, Wellard, and the Metronet-adjacent corridors around Morley and Ellenbrook, where new-build estates are being listed at pace and photographs from one lot can end up attached to a neighbouring title with minimal oversight. The Real Estate Institute of Western Australia, based on Havelock Street in West Perth, has been fielding agent queries on best-practice standards for digital asset management, according to publicly available guidance on its website.

The State Records Office of Western Australia, which sits under the Department of Justice, maintains requirements for how government agencies handle image data attached to land records. Duplicate or erroneously assigned imagery in official title documentation is a separate but related concern, particularly as Landgate — the state's land information authority, headquartered in Midland — continues its multi-year push to digitise and integrate spatial records. Landgate's digital cadastral database underpins planning decisions across the Perth metropolitan area.

Digital integrity specialists working with local councils point to a systemic gap: there is no mandatory deduplication check before photographs are uploaded to either commercial listing portals or council asset registers. The City of Stirling and the City of Wanneroo, both managing rapid growth precincts, have each updated internal asset-management policies in the past two years, though the specifics of those updates are contained in internal operational documents rather than public-facing policy statements.

What Needs to Change, and Who Is Saying It

The conversation around remediation has split along roughly two lines. One camp — broadly represented by technology vendors supplying real estate platforms — argues that AI-assisted image hashing can identify and flag duplicates at the point of upload, before a listing goes live. Several such tools have been piloted by agencies operating out of Subiaco and Osborne Park since late 2024. The other camp, which includes some planning and heritage advocates, argues that the solution is procedural rather than algorithmic: mandatory photographer accreditation tied to a listing address, with penalties for mismatched submissions.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has existing powers under the Australian Consumer Law to pursue misleading representations in property advertising, including photographic content. While no WA-specific enforcement action on this precise issue has been publicly announced, the ACCC's guidance materials explicitly identify property imagery as within scope of those provisions.

For buyers navigating the current market — where a standard three-bedroom home in the northern suburbs of Perth has been trading well above $600,000 through the first half of 2026 — the practical advice from consumer advocates is blunt: cross-check every listing photograph against the street address using Google Street View, request a date-stamped photo set directly from the selling agent, and never rely on portal thumbnails alone when assessing a property remotely. The Metronet expansion, which has added stations at Morley-Ellenbrook and beyond since 2024, has accelerated off-the-plan purchasing in corridors where finished streetscapes do not yet exist — making the duplicate image problem especially acute for that class of buyer.

Landgate has not issued a public statement on the matter. The Real Estate Institute of Western Australia's published conduct guidelines require agents to present accurate property representations, but enforcement of those standards ultimately sits with the Department of Energy, Mines, Industry Regulation and Safety, which administers real estate licensing in WA. That agency's property industry complaints register, updated quarterly, will be the clearest indicator of whether formal complaints on this issue are rising — and the next update is due in September 2026.