'My home looks like a stranger's house': Canberra residents speak out on duplicate image problem

A quiet but persistent problem is frustrating homeowners, renters, and property managers across the ACT: duplicate and misassigned images attached to property listings, government records, and digital planning portals are showing up on the wrong addresses, sometimes with serious consequences. Community members in Gungahlin, Belconnen, and the inner south say the issue has affected insurance claims, rental applications, and even land valuations.

The timing matters. The ACT government's ongoing digital overhaul of property and planning records — part of its broader transition to a centralised data platform under the Access Canberra service umbrella — has pushed more Canberrans than ever into direct contact with digital property records. When those records carry the wrong images, the knock-on effects can be immediate and practical.

Wrong photos, real consequences

Residents contacted The Daily Canberra after noticing the problem in several contexts. One Gungahlin townhouse owner described discovering that photographs of a neighbouring property on Efkarpidis Street had been attached to their own listing on a major real estate aggregator site for at least six weeks. The mix-up, they said, led a prospective tenant to decline an inspection after assuming the property lacked off-street parking — a feature the correct photographs would have shown clearly. Another resident in the Belconnen town centre area said images from their unit block appeared on a different building's entry in the ACT Property Sales Data portal, which is publicly accessible through the ACT Revenue Office website.

A Dickson property manager, who asked not to be named because she was not authorised to speak on behalf of her agency, said her office had logged at least four complaints related to duplicate images since January 2026, all involving properties listed through third-party data aggregators that pull from multiple government and commercial sources. She described the resolution process as slow and said her clients bore most of the administrative burden of requesting corrections.

The ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal handled 312 tenancy-related disputes in the first quarter of 2026, according to figures published in its most recent quarterly activity report. While the tribunal does not break out image-related disputes as a separate category, advocates at the Tenants' Union ACT, based on Childers Street in the city, say documentation errors — including photographic mismatches — are a recurring complication in disputes over bond returns and condition reports.

Where the images come from — and why fixing them is complicated

The core problem is structural. Property images in Australia flow through several layers: the original agent or owner uploads them to a platform such as realestate.com.au or Domain, those platforms feed data to aggregators, and some government portals in turn draw on aggregator feeds rather than primary sources. Once a duplicate image embeds itself in that chain, correcting it at one node does not automatically scrub it from others.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's Digital Platforms Services inquiry, whose most recent report was published in March 2025, flagged data integrity across real estate listing ecosystems as an area warranting closer attention, though the regulator stopped short of recommending immediate binding rules.

At the local level, the ACT Planning directorate updated its land information system in February 2026 as part of the Territory Plan transition, but community members say they have not noticed a corresponding improvement in image accuracy on public-facing records.

For Canberrans dealing with the problem now, the Tenants' Union ACT recommends documenting every discrepancy with screenshots that include the URL and timestamp, then lodging formal correction requests simultaneously with the listing platform, the data aggregator, and — where a government portal is involved — Access Canberra directly via its online service request system. Homeowners with concerns about how misassigned images may affect their ACT land tax or rates assessment can request a formal record review through the ACT Revenue Office, which accepts written requests by post to 33 Allara Street in the city or via its MyAccount online portal. Getting the images right before a sale, rental, or insurance assessment, advocates say, is far easier than untangling a dispute after the fact.