In 2014, a warehouse was advertised online at 517m². About $40 per square metre. Office, workshop, storage, a mezzanine.
A transport company director viewed it. Signed a lease. Paid $30,000 a year for it. Guaranteed it personally.
In 2016, a valuer measured the space: 339.3m².
267.7 square metres of the contracted area — 44% of it — did not exist.
One number, three versions
Here’s the part that gets me. Watch the number travel:
April 2014, the listing: 517m².
September 2014, the confirmation email: 517m² warehouse, plus a 95m² office.
October 2014, the lease schedule: 517m² warehouse, plus a 90m² office.
Three documents. Three versions. The office space appears out of nowhere between the ad and the email, then shrinks 5m² between the email and the lease. Nobody reconciled any of it. Not the agent who wrote all three, not the owners, not anyone.
The 517m² itself? A previous tenant had leased this unit plus an adjoining space. Combined: 517m². The old number got copied into the new listing, then flowed downstream into the lease like water finding a drain.
“But she viewed it”
The tenant raised the size in a text message in July 2016. The agent replied that the rear building was 300m². That text is the first moment, two years in, that anyone said the real number out loud.
The complaint took years to reach the regulator. When it did, the Complaints Assessment Committee declined to even inquire. Their logic: yes, the advertising was wrong, but the tenant viewed the space before signing — three times, allegedly — so the error had no material impact. Technical breach. Case closed.
The Tribunal just reversed that, and the reasoning matters for every commercial agent in the country:
Rule 6.4 doesn’t require actual reliance. The test isn’t whether the tenant was fooled. It’s whether the misstatement was capable of materially affecting her decision — to sign, and on what rent. When the ad prices space at $40/m², the floor area isn’t decoration. It’s the pricing formula.
“She saw it with her own eyes” is not a defence. Eyes are bad at measuring 600 square metres.
Two other findings worth filing away:
Procuring a lease — the advertising, the negotiation, the signing — is real estate agency work, full stop. The agent here was a property manager, an employee, never called herself an agent. Irrelevant. The work defines the duty, not the job title.
No bad faith was found. This wasn’t fraud. It was a copied number that nobody ever checked. The Tribunal’s view: that might be the breach — failing to verify a critical fact before putting it in a binding document could be the very carelessness that turns an innocent error into a misleading one.
Eleven years, zero interceptions
Step back and count. The error was born in April 2014. It passed through a listing, an email, and a lease. It was first questioned in 2016. The formal complaint landed in 2023. The Tribunal ordered a proper investigation in mid-2025 — and even now, nothing is decided. The case just went back for an inquiry that should have happened a decade ago.
At no point in that chain did any system compare document A against document B. The contradiction sat there, in writing, on both sides of the same email thread, for years. Finding it required a tenant with a tape measure and a grudge.
This is not a story about one careless agent. The Tribunal went out of its way to say there was no dishonesty. It’s a story about an industry that produces representations at industrial scale — listings, emails, flyers, texts, lease schedules — and keeps no memory of any of them. Every claim is written once, trusted forever, checked never.
That’s the gap I’m building Resaido into. Not a faster way to write listings — the world has enough of those. A memory. Something that holds every representation an agency puts into the world, across every channel, and raises its hand the moment two of them disagree. In this file, it would have flagged the ghost office space in September 2014. Before the lease. Before the guarantee. Before eleven years of everything else.
The complaint is now back with the Committee. I’ll be watching what they do with it.
Every representation should leave a record that can be checked. That's the whole idea. — Field Notes, Resaido. [2025] NZREADT 25, 14 July 2025; anonymised under a non-publication order.