In 2021, a licensed salesperson at a well-known Auckland agency marketed a Remuera property, took it to a pre-auction offer, and got the paperwork signed off by his managers — all for a vendor he had never spoken to. Not once. Not by phone, not by WeChat, not through an interpreter.
The vendor lived in China. Her daughter approached the agent to sell the house. The daughter was not an owner. She had no power of attorney. And here’s the detail that ended up mattering most: the agent knew this from day one.
The decision is CAC 2106 v Pang [2024] NZREADT 01, and it’s worth reading closely — not because the conduct is exotic, but because the underlying pattern is one of the most common in Auckland real estate.
What actually happened
On 11 June 2021, the agent messaged the daughter on WeChat asking whether a lawyer had been engaged to set up a power of attorney so she could sign for her mother. The answer was no — mum was “too busy.” So instead of stopping, he asked for the vendor’s digital signature and initials. He asked on the 11th, the 12th, and the 14th. He even doubted whether the daughter had spoken to her mother at all, and tried the vendor’s personal assistant instead.
On 27 June, the daughter sent him the signature file.
From there:
He inserted the vendor’s electronic signature into the agency agreement, the property checklist, the pre-auction offer form, and the memorandum of contract.
He handwrote the vendor’s initial — “Z” — on each page, including against every Client Acknowledgement in clause 16: the clauses confirming he had recommended legal advice, provided the approved guide, and explained the complaints process. To a client he had never spoken to.
When his supervising agent asked to speak to the vendor before the pre-auction offer was accepted, he said the vendor didn’t speak English, and routed her to the daughter instead.
It unravelled in November 2021, when the vendor pulled out of the auction and the directors started asking questions. On a conference call, the agent denied handwriting the initials — until his manager put the electronic initial and the handwritten one side by side and texted him the comparison during the call. Then he admitted everything.
The Tribunal found wilful contravention of rr 5.1, 6.3, 9.6, 9.7, 12.2 and 12.3 — misconduct under s 73(c)(iii) of the Real Estate Agents Act 2008. Licence cancellation was on the table.
The legal spine: verbal authority is not authority
Two paragraphs of the decision do most of the work, and both are worth internalising if you touch cross-border transactions.
First, [42]: even if the vendor had verbally approved her daughter handling the sale — which the agent claimed — the daughter had no power of attorney, so she was not legally entitled to engage the agency, appoint the agent, or approve anything. The agency agreement was invalid. Full stop. Verbal blessing from overseas does not cure the absence of formal authority. Everything built on top of that agreement — the marketing, the offer, the memorandum — was built on nothing.
Second, [45]: giving the required advice and disclosures to a family member who “promises to pass it on” does not discharge the licensee’s obligations to the client. The duty runs to the vendor directly, or to someone holding her power of attorney. There is no “trusted relative” exception in the Rules.
Neither of these is a new proposition. What’s striking is how squarely the fact pattern maps onto everyday practice in the Chinese cross-border market: overseas owner, adult child on the ground, everything coordinated over WeChat, documents “handled” by whoever is available. Most of the time nothing goes wrong, so nobody looks. This decision is what it looks like when somebody does.
The law already has the fix — it costs a few hundred dollars
Here’s the frustrating part. New Zealand law has a clean, cheap, well-worn answer to “the owner is overseas and busy”: a power of attorney.
For an absent-but-capable vendor, an ordinary POA lets a chosen attorney validly sign agency agreements and sale documents. For the incapacity scenario, the Protection of Personal and Property Rights Act 1988 provides for enduring powers of attorney — one covering property and finances, one covering personal care and welfare. Without one, no family member — not a spouse, not an adult child — has automatic authority over someone else’s affairs. The fallback is a Family Court application, which is slow, expensive, public, and puts the choice of decision-maker in a judge’s hands instead of the family’s.
A properly witnessed POA is a solicitor appointment and a modest fee. The workaround in Pang cost the agent his career, invalidated the transaction, and dragged the vendor’s family into a disciplinary proceeding.
When a vendor’s representative says “mum is too busy for a lawyer,” the correct translation is: this transaction does not yet exist.
What actually convicted him: the record
Read the wilfulness analysis in [49] and notice what the Tribunal is actually citing. Not vibes. Not credibility contests. Timestamps.
The 11 June WeChat message proving he knew a POA was required — before he entered the agency agreement.
His own email forwarding the texts and translations.
The 11 August email where he told his manager he’d spoken to the vendor — a lie, preserved in writing.
The side-by-side photo of the two initials, texted mid-call on 16 November.
The wilfulness finding — the difference between “honest mistake” and career-ending misconduct — was constructed almost entirely from a chain of the agent’s own representations, made across channels, over five months, each one dated and attributable. The Tribunal’s job was essentially to assemble that chain and read it in order.
This is the part I keep coming back to, because it’s the thesis behind what I’m building.
Real estate runs on representations — who said what, to whom, with what authority, on what date — and the industry has no memory layer for them.
In Pang, the record existed by accident: the agency happened to have good policies, the manager happened to screenshot the initials, the agent happened to forward his own WeChat threads. When the record exists, tribunals can act with precision. When it doesn’t, contradictions dissolve into he-said-she-said and the CAC file goes nowhere.
That asymmetry — accountability only where records accidentally survive — is the gap Resaido is built for: tracking agent representations across channels over time, flagging where they contradict, and grounding the evidence chain in exactly the READT and CAC case law this decision now joins.
Takeaways
If you’re a licensee: the moment authority is unclear, stop. “The family is handling it” is a signal to require a POA, not to improvise around one. And assume everything you write — every WeChat message, every email to your manager — is a future exhibit. In this case, it was.
If you’re an overseas owner (or their child): get the POA done before the listing, not after. It’s the cheapest document in the entire transaction, and it’s the difference between a valid sale and CAC 2106 v Pang.
If you’re building in this space: the interesting problem isn’t making agents faster. It’s that the whole disciplinary system depends on evidence chains nobody is systematically keeping.
Field Notes is where I write about NZ real estate law, compliance, and the tools I'm building at the intersection. I ship legal-AI product - Resaido.
Not legal advice — if this fact pattern is your fact pattern, talk to a solicitor before you sign anything (or before anyone signs anything for you).