Perth Leads Australian Cities in Scrubbing Duplicate Property Images — But Global Rivals Are Moving Faster

Perth's property market is drowning in copies of itself. Duplicate listing images — the same photograph of a Baldivis three-bedroom or a Northbridge studio appearing across REIT.com.au, Domain, and a dozen agency websites simultaneously — have become one of the more stubborn irritants in WA's red-hot housing sector, and the industry is only now starting to treat it as a structural problem rather than a minor annoyance.

The timing matters. WA's population grew by roughly 3.4 per cent in the year to March 2025, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics data, driven partly by immigration and AUKUS-related defence workforce arrivals centred around the Henderson shipyard precinct and HMAS Stirling at Garden Island. That surge pushed rental vacancy rates in Perth's inner suburbs below one per cent for much of late 2025, according to the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia. When supply is this tight, a prospective tenant or buyer clicking through what looks like four separate listings — only to discover it's the same Subiaco unit photographed from slightly different angles — wastes time neither party has.

What Duplicate Images Actually Cost

The problem is technical and commercial at once. Property management software used by agencies on Hay Street and across the CBD typically syndicates a single listing's image library to multiple portals automatically. When an agent updates a photo, cancels a listing, or re-lists a property after a brief vacancy, old image sets often persist in portal caches. Perth-based proptech firm Box+Dice, which services agencies across WA and nationally, has been among the platforms working on automated deduplication tools that flag repeated image hashes before syndication fires.

PropTrack, the data arm of REA Group, began rolling out image-similarity detection across realestate.com.au listings nationally in the second half of 2025, targeting what the company described internally as "phantom inventory" — listings that inflate apparent stock figures without representing genuinely available properties. The effect on Perth search results was measurable: agents working the Scarborough and Innaloo corridors reported cleaner search returns within weeks of the tool going live, according to agency principals who spoke in general terms at a REIWA forum in May 2026.

Globally, Perth's challenge is neither unique nor particularly advanced by world standards. Amsterdam's Funda portal, which dominates Dutch residential property search, implemented perceptual hashing for duplicate image detection as far back as 2021, reducing duplicate visual content by what the platform reported as 34 per cent within its first year. Toronto's real estate board mandated unique image sets per listing on its MLS system from January 2023. Singapore's PropertyGuru went further, using AI-driven image authentication to verify that listing photos match geotagged building data — a measure partly motivated by the city-state's acute sensitivity to misleading rental advertising.

Perth's Next Steps

Against those benchmarks, Perth is catching up but not leading. The City of Perth's smart city team, based at Citiplace on Murray Street, has held preliminary conversations with REIWA about whether local government data — including planning approvals and occupancy records — could be cross-referenced with portal listings to catch structural duplicates earlier in the pipeline. Those talks are at an early stage and no formal program has been announced.

What's more concrete is pressure from consumers. Tenants advocacy group Tenants WA, headquartered in East Perth, flagged duplicate listing confusion in its 2025 annual report as a contributor to wasted application fees — a particular concern given WA's ban on rental bidding, which already limits how applicants can differentiate themselves. With application fees sometimes running to $50 or more for reference checks, clicking through phantom listings has a real dollar cost.

For anyone searching Perth's rental or sales market right now, the practical advice from agents and advocates is consistent: cross-reference listing dates on multiple platforms before committing to an inspection request, and use the "listed on" date field — not the photo upload date — to identify whether a property is genuinely fresh to market. Portals are getting better at cleaning their own data. Until they get all the way there, the legwork falls on the searcher.