Duplicate Images on Council's Property Portal: What Officials and Experts Are Saying

Central Coast Council acknowledged this week that its public-facing property and development application portal contains a significant number of duplicate and mismatched images — photographs attached to the wrong addresses, repeated across multiple listings, or simply outdated by years. The problem, which affects residents checking development applications and property information through the Council's online systems, has drawn criticism from local real estate professionals, planning advocates and digital governance specialists who say the issue is symptomatic of deeper data-management failures inside a council still rebuilding trust after its 2020 administration.

The timing is difficult. Council has spent the past two years promoting its Gosford CBD renewal agenda and pushing hard for investment in the Gosford Waterfront precinct. When the public-facing digital tools underpinning those efforts show a house on Georgiana Terrace where a Mann Street commercial property should be, it undermines confidence in the institution's operational competence, planning advocates say.

Why It Matters Now

The portal failures aren't cosmetic. Residents lodging objections to development applications near Erina Fair or along the Pacific Highway corridor rely on accurate site images to understand what's being proposed and where. Planning consultants working on submissions for the Gosford and Wyong local area corridors have noted privately that incorrect imagery attached to DA records can delay response times and, in some cases, prompt objections based on entirely the wrong property.

Central Coast Council entered administration in October 2020 after a financial crisis that saw it accumulate debts that, at one point, were publicly reported at around $565 million. The council returned to elected representation in December 2021. Digital infrastructure investment was deprioritised during the recovery period, according to publicly available council budget documents from 2022–23, with technology upgrade spending deferred across multiple departments.

The NSW Department of Planning and Environment's ePlanning portal, which links to council-level DA tracking tools, requires councils to maintain image and document integrity as part of their system integration obligations. Where local portals fail that standard, planners and objectors are left cross-referencing paper records at the Gosford administration building on Donnison Street — a process that can add weeks to already stretched assessment timelines.

What the Fix Looks Like — and Who's Responsible

Technology governance specialists who work with NSW local government bodies describe the underlying problem as a data migration hangover. When councils shift between content management systems — something Central Coast did in stages between 2021 and 2024 as part of its recovery plan — image metadata frequently becomes decoupled from its parent record. Without a structured de-duplication audit, errors compound over time rather than resolving themselves.

The recommended approach, according to NSW Government's own digital records guidelines published by the State Archives and Records Authority, is a full image registry audit cross-referenced against council's geographic information system data. On a portfolio the size of Central Coast Council's — which covers more than 340,000 residents across a local government area stretching from Mooney Mooney Creek in the south to Lake Munmorah in the north — that is not a small job. Industry benchmarks suggest a GIS-linked image audit of comparable scope takes between three and six months and typically costs between $180,000 and $350,000 depending on whether it is handled in-house or contracted out.

Council has not publicly confirmed a timeline or budget allocation for corrective action as of 4 July 2026. A council spokesperson directed enquiries to the digital services team; no further detail was provided before deadline.

For residents and applicants dealing with the problem right now, the practical advice from planning professionals is straightforward: do not rely solely on portal images when lodging a DA objection or reviewing a neighbour's application. Cross-check using the NSW Spatial Viewer, request the hard-copy site plan from Council's Gosford offices, and note the DA number, not just the address, in any correspondence. The image problem does not affect the underlying application data — it is a display-layer issue — but acting on wrong imagery can invalidate a submission's factual basis.

Central Coast Council's next ordinary meeting is scheduled for late July. Residents and planning groups including the Central Coast Community Environment Network are expected to raise the portal reliability issue if no resolution is announced before then.