A buyer and a salesperson are alone in a lawyer’s office. The lawyer has stepped out to print an offer — $25.2 million, unconditional, for a development site the buyer has been circling for months.
At 9:20am a message lands on the salesperson’s phone. If this offer succeeds, the buyer writes, we split your commission fifty-fifty.
The reply, from the salesperson’s phone: “OK.”
Who typed it? The salesperson swears the buyer grabbed his phone off the table and typed it himself. The buyer says they weren’t even in the same room — he was already in his car.
Here’s the part worth sitting with: the Tribunal never decided. It didn’t need to.
The texts he doesn’t deny
Because at 9:27am, the salesperson sent his own messages. Not a denial. Terms. Only my after-tax share, not the gross. Only if you buy this property through me. At 10:11am, alone in his own car, he sent one more, tightening the wording again.
The Tribunal called those three texts what they were: an unequivocal agreement. Reluctant, maybe. Under pressure, maybe. Still an agreement — one he then said nothing about to his manager or to his clients, the vendors, for almost two weeks, while the deal closed at $26.5 million and roughly $326k in commission landed.
Forty-four minutes of texting. Two weeks of silence. The Tribunal was clear about which one made this serious.
What the rule actually tests
The charge ran on r 6.1 — fiduciary obligations to your client. And the finding strips the rule down to something uncomfortably simple.
It did not matter that the vendors lost nothing. It did not matter whether the arrangement even helped the salesperson. The vendors were entitled to know, at the moment that offer hit their table, that their agent had a side arrangement with the man on the other side of it. A client is <cite>”entitled to the single-minded loyalty of his fiduciary.”</cite> Divided loyalty, undisclosed, is the breach. Full stop.
His fallback — I knew the vendors would never take $25.2m, so the deal would never bite — went nowhere. Fiduciary obligations are absolute. You don’t get to breach one because you’ve privately handicapped the odds.
And the detail that should make every agent wince: the complainant was the buyer. The man who never got his cut. In a secret arrangement, your counterparty holds the receipt forever, and the receipt was a WeChat transcript.
Fine, but what if someone really does grab your phone
The phone-grab defence sounds absurd. Most people reading the decision will laugh at it. I want to take it seriously for a second, because versions of it are real: a pushy party takes over your device, words are put in your mouth in a group chat, someone “confirms” a deal you never agreed to. What then?
The salesperson tried the recall button. Too late — and the transcript still showed “recalled a message.” Recall is not a defence. It’s barely a fig leaf.
The version of that morning that survives a hearing looks like this:
The counter-record, in writing, immediately. Not a verbal protest in the room. A message, sent the moment you’re free: You took my phone and replied without my consent. I do not agree to share any commission. Sixty seconds of typing. It converts “his word against mine” into a timestamped fact.
Your manager, the same day. Here’s the nuance most summaries will miss: back in July, when the buyer first pushed for a split, this salesperson did tell his manager. That early report is a big part of why the Tribunal couldn’t rule out his story — and why he walked away with unsatisfactory conduct instead of misconduct. Disclosure literally bought the charge down a level. The October silence is what he was actually punished for.
Disclosure to the client before the offer is presented. The breach crystallised at the moment the $25.2m offer went to the vendors with nobody aware of the side deal. Everything before that was recoverable.
Notice what all three have in common. None of them require you to be believed. They require you to have said it, in writing, at the time.
Where the legal line actually sits
Worth saying plainly: money moving toward a buyer is not automatically the problem. Rebates, incentives, developer cashbacks — disclosed, documented, sitting in the agreement where every lawyer and lender can see them — live on the legal side of the line.
The line this decision draws isn’t about whether money moved. It’s about who knew. The same dollars, moved in daylight, are a marketing cost. Moved in a recalled WeChat message, they’re a disciplinary finding with your name published on it.
The record is the case
Step back and look at how the Tribunal actually worked. It didn’t weigh souls. It read a message timeline and looked for contradictions. I never intended to share — against three texts negotiating the split. It was just damage control — against texts a week later chasing the deposit into the right trust account. I was trapped — against two weeks of saying nothing to the people he owed loyalty to.
Every contradiction, the story lost. That’s the whole judgment.
This is the reading I’m building Resaido to do — before it’s done to you. It takes what an agent has said, across channels, over time, timestamps it, and flags where the record argues with itself: the claim that contradicts an earlier claim, the silence sitting where a disclosure should be. Not because agents are dishonest, but because nobody remembers their own paper trail — and the Tribunal doesn’t read your intentions. It reads your file, end to end, and so should you, two years before anyone else does.
The test was never were you honest that morning. The test is what does your record say when a stranger reads it in order. His said: agreed at 9:27, tightened terms at 10:11, chased the money on the 16th, went quiet for two weeks.
No phone grab explains that. Nothing does. That’s the point.
Field Notes is where I read NZ real estate disciplinary decisions so you don’t have to — and build Resaido, a tool that watches the record the way a tribunal does, in public. If that’s your kind of thing, stick around.