In October 2013 a buyer bought a house in Auckland. The advertising said it came with a carpark.
There was one. A strip of asphalt sat between that house and the neighbour’s, wide enough for two cars, split down the middle by red reflective studs set into the seal. One space each side. The vendors’ agency agreement said the property had off street parking. The salesperson had sold the same house back in 2007. In all those years nobody had raised anything about the parking.
Then in 2018 the neighbour said the carpark was his. In 2021 he pulled the red studs out, painted white lines, and put bollards where he said the boundary ran.
The buyer complained to the Authority in September 2024. Eleven years after settlement. Six years after she first learned there was a problem.
The Committee took no further action. She appealed. On 28 May 2026 the Tribunal dismissed the appeal and confirmed the Committee.
Why the agent won
The test is red flags. Not whether the ad turned out to be wrong — whether there was something in front of the agent at the time that should have made her stop and ask.
The Tribunal repeated the line that runs through this whole area of the case law: a licensee must know what they are selling, but they are not solicitors, surveyors or building inspectors, and they are not required to anticipate a problem that might not exist. It also said the flip side out loud. Where a boundary is unclear — no fence, nothing obvious — an agent is expected to be proactive if they are asked, or could reasonably expect to be asked. Requiring a boundary check in every file where nothing looks wrong would be too much.
So what did she actually have in 2013?
The vendor told her there was off street parking, and the agency agreement said so.
The two carparks were physically marked out with reflective studs, and those markers lined up with where she understood the boundary to be.
The flats plan did not show the carparking areas at all.
The previous occupants had treated the carpark as theirs since at least 2005.
She told the buyer to have her solicitor check the title and auction documents. Neither the buyer nor her solicitor came back with a question about the parking.
On those facts the Tribunal found nothing that should have prompted further enquiry. It also drew the line against DQ [2025] NZREADT 16, where a single shared driveway entrance serving two street addresses was an obvious signal that somebody needed to ask whose land the driveway sat on. A shared entry raises the question by itself. Two spaces with a marked line down the middle, used the same way for eight years, does not.
And on r 6.4 the Tribunal went back to Vosper: for a misrepresentation to be a disciplinary matter, an honest statement that turns out to be wrong is not enough. There has to be something more.
That is a defensible outcome. I do not think it is the interesting part.
The evidence arrived too late, and from the wrong person
The buyer put new material in front of the Tribunal twice. Photographs she had marked up herself. A side by side of the 1987 and 2009 flats plans with her own annotations showing where she said the carpark sat relative to the legal boundary. Then, attached to her reply in April 2026, a surveyor’s document dated 31 March 2026.
She never applied for leave to file any of it, even after the Tribunal specifically told her in January that she would need to.
The Tribunal read it anyway and refused all of it. The marked-up material was not credible — she is not independent and not an expert on legal boundaries, and she could have got this in front of the Committee with reasonable diligence. The survey report went the same way: no statement from the author about their qualifications or the basis of the report, no chance for the licensee to get her own expert in, and it was an inspection carried out in March 2026. It shows where the boundary is now. It says nothing about what the agent saw, or should have seen, in October 2013.
That last point is the one worth writing on a sticky note. In a disciplinary case, evidence about the world today is not evidence about the decision the agent made years ago. The only thing that ever mattered was the state of knowledge at the time, and by the time anyone went looking for it, it had to be reconstructed.
Which brings me to the part the decision mentions almost in passing
Counsel for the licensee raised the delay. Eleven years since the sale. Six years since the buyer knew. And by then the licensee had left the agency, both she and the agency had tried to pull the documents together, and the results were limited. The agency does not retain records.
Read that again. Not “the records were incomplete”. The agency does not keep them.
So the entire question of what this agent said, showed, wrote or handed over in 2013 came down to: the agency agreement, the flats plan, the marketing brochure, and her own recollection.
She won. She won on the merits, and on this record I think the outcome is right. But notice why the missing file did not sink her. The onus sits on the complainant. The buyer had to prove the agent got it wrong, not the other way round. A blank file hurts whoever carries the burden, and here that was not the agent.
That is not a system. That is which side of the table you happened to be sitting on.
Turn one fact and it flips. If the neighbour had raised the carpark in 2011 and the agent had been told about it, the buyer’s case would live or die on whether that conversation could be proved. Eleven years later, with no records retained and the salesperson gone, it could not be proved either way. The person who needed it would simply lose.
What I keep taking out of these cases
Two agents can behave identically and end up in completely different places, because one of them can show what they knew and when they knew it, and the other cannot.
The industry treats this as a filing problem. It is not. It is a memory problem. Representations do not live in the file — they live in a listing description, a text on a Saturday afternoon, an answer given standing on the driveway at an open home, a line in an email to a solicitor. They are made across a dozen channels over months, and no one ever puts them next to each other. By the time somebody asks, years have passed, the agent has moved agencies, and the record is whatever anyone can still remember.
That gap is what Resaido is built for. Not to make agents faster. To give the industry a memory — one place where what was said about a property is captured as it is said, kept in order, and can still be produced when somebody asks eleven years later.
Because this case was decided on the state of knowledge in 2013. Nobody could produce it. It just happened not to matter this time.
Next one might not be so tidy.
Field Notes — where I read the cases that explain why Resaido exists.
Not legal advice. If this fact pattern is your fact pattern, talk to a solicitor.