Townsville Council Cracks Down on Duplicate Property Images After Week of ComplaintsUpdated

Townsville City Council confirmed this week it is conducting an audit of its online property information portal after duplicate and mismatched images — including photographs of the wrong homes attached to planning and rates records — were reported by residents and real estate professionals across multiple northern suburbs. The problem surfaced publicly on Monday, June 30, when listings tied to properties in Kirwan and Aitkenvale began displaying photographs that belonged to entirely different addresses.

The timing matters. The Townsville property market has been moving at pace, with buyer inquiries up and several off-the-plan developments along the Strand and in the Bohle Plains growth corridor reaching settlement stage. Agents and conveyancers rely on council portal data to cross-check property boundaries, flood-overlay flags, and planning zones. A wrong image attached to the wrong record is not a cosmetic glitch — it can delay settlement, confuse building inspectors, and in flood-prone areas, lead a buyer to misread a property's risk profile.

What Went Wrong and Where

The issue appears to trace back to a bulk image upload carried out as part of a broader upgrade to the council's digital services platform, which began rolling out in late May 2026. That upgrade was designed to integrate aerial photography from a contracted survey flight completed over the city in March. Several images from the Heatley and Mundingburra areas were indexed under incorrect lot numbers during the migration, according to information provided to The Daily Townsville by a conveyancing firm operating out of Flinders Street in the CBD — though the firm declined to be named pending resolution of active transactions.

Real Estate Institute of Queensland's Townsville chapter did not respond to a request for comment by deadline. However, at least three separate agencies — including offices on Ross River Road and in the Willows Shopping Centre precinct in Thuringowa Central — told this newspaper they had flagged discrepancies to the council's development services counter at the Townsville City Council administration building on Walker Street between Tuesday and Thursday this week.

The council's online GIS mapping tool, which overlays imagery against cadastral boundaries, was temporarily displaying thumbnails from one street block against lot records from neighbouring blocks. In practical terms: a buyer researching a Heatley post-war Queenslander might have been looking at an image of a Mundingburra brick-veneer unit, and vice versa. Neither image was labelled with a street address in the thumbnail view, compounding the risk of confusion.

Audit Under Way, Corrections Being Rolled Out

Council's digital services team began manually correcting records on Wednesday, July 2, and by Friday afternoon, July 4, the majority of flagged listings in the Kirwan, Aitkenvale, and Heatley areas had been updated. A council spokesperson — who confirmed the issue in a written response but was not authorised to be named — said the audit was expected to be complete by July 11 and would cover all records updated during the March-to-June image migration.

The scope is not trivial. Townsville City Council's local government area covers more than 3,700 square kilometres, and the March aerial survey captured imagery across residential, industrial, and rural zones including the Bohle industrial estate, the area around Lavarack Barracks, and rural properties out toward the Ross Dam catchment zone. Checking each migrated image against its corresponding lot record is labour-intensive, and the council has not indicated whether additional staff have been brought in to accelerate the audit.

For residents and buyers with active transactions, the practical advice is straightforward: do not rely solely on the council portal's thumbnail image to identify a property. Cross-reference with Queensland's Department of Resources spatial imagery tool, which is updated independently, or request a site inspection. Conveyancers working on properties in the affected northern and central suburbs should request a fresh council rates certificate dated after July 11 to ensure records have been corrected before settlement. Anyone who believes a current planning or rates record still shows incorrect imagery can lodge a correction request directly through the Townsville City Council's customer service portal or in person at Walker Street.