In July 2021, a Barfoot salesperson looked at the aerial photos of a Takapuna commercial building and told the office where to draw the boundary in. Along the fence line. He also had them add three words to the image: boundary lines approximate.
Those three words sit on almost every listing in this country. In May, the Real Estate Agents Disciplinary Tribunal explained when they stop working.
The property backed onto a reserve, and a concrete pad ran out past the legal title — a corner onto Auckland Council reserve land, and a longer strip down the side onto Crown land. The information memorandum said 25 carparks. Around 15 were actually inside the boundary. The buyer found out in December, when a valuer rang him about a financing valuation and asked whether he knew the boundary ran through the parking.
Two charges. One for the encroachment Brown knew about, one for the encroachment he didn’t know about but should have. Both came back as unsatisfactory conduct at the upper end. Misconduct wasn’t made out; the Tribunal found nothing deliberate in it.
The part I want to sit with is the disclaimer.
The caveat is attached to his own line
Two different situations get confused here.
One is where an agent passes on a plan somebody else prepared and hedges it. The other is where the agent produces the thing being hedged. This was the second one. Brown instructed the administrators to place the boundary lines on the photos, and he chose where they went.
So “approximate” wasn’t flagging that an outside source might be imprecise. It was a note he wrote about a line he drew.
Then he found out
Marketing went live on 30 July. On 12 August, walking the site, he noticed the boundary didn’t follow the fence in the back corner. TV first rang about the property on 24 August.
Nobody wrote that caveat with the August knowledge in mind. It couldn’t have been written that way. The knowledge didn’t exist yet.
This is what I think gets missed in practice. A disclaimer is a statement about what you know, made on the day you write it. What you know keeps moving. The document doesn’t. And nothing in the file tells you the sentence has quietly stopped covering what it used to cover.
The Committee put it plainly and the Tribunal agreed: a disclaimer ought not to apply where the licensee actually knows the boundary line is wrong.
“Approximate” doesn’t reach the number
There are two claims on that page. One is qualified. One isn’t.
Boundary lines approximate.
25 carparks.
25 is not approximate. It’s a count, and the buyer used it as one — Brown’s email said he could comfortably ask $25 per park per week, and the IM called the parking “a significant drawcard for prospective tenants at this location”. You can put that in a spreadsheet. You can take it to a bank.
A hedge on the map doesn’t travel across the page and land on the number. Least of all when the number is the thing the property is being sold on.
Rule 6.4 does two jobs
Don’t mislead. Don’t withhold information that should by law or in fairness be provided.
Argue if you want that “approximate” softened the first one. It does nothing to the second. Brown mentioned the boundary to at least two other groups while walking them round the site. He didn’t mention it to TV. Small text on a photograph is not disclosure to a person.
The finding at [was both limbs. Misled and withheld.
You can stay quiet. You can’t un-say it.
The Tribunal went back to McAuley: there is ordinarily no obligation on a licensee to research the extent of the land in the title, with an exception where there is patently some doubt.
In McAuley the licensee had made no positive representation about where the boundary ran, and that was the end of it. Brown made one, in writing, with a line on a photo, on a feature he was actively selling. Once it’s said, a caveat doesn’t put it back.
The hard part
As a rule it’s clean. A marketing disclaimer doesn’t cure an inaccuracy the licensee knows about.
The trigger is knowledge. Knowledge isn’t in the document.
You could read that information memorandum all afternoon and not be able to tell whether the disclaimer was doing its job. It’s a live caveat on 30 July and a dead one from 12 August, and the page looks exactly the same either way.
So look at what actually proved knowledge here. Something he said to other viewers at an open home. Two accounts given to the Committee eight months apart that didn’t line up. And a phone call the buyer recorded, in which Brown said there had been a question of updating the marketing and they just hadn’t got around to it after lockdown.
None of that is in the file. The only contemporaneous record of what Brown knew, and when, was made by the person complaining about him. Brown couldn’t produce the Property Guru search he said he’d relied on and couldn’t say whether he’d checked the LIM.
He didn’t forget, either. has him deciding the difference was so minor it didn’t need escalating. That’s a judgment call, and people are entitled to make bad ones.
What he wasn’t able to do, three years later, was show anyone what that call had looked like at the time.
Penalty is being determined on the papers. Liability decision dated 7 May 2026.
I write Field Notes while building Resaido, a compliance memory tool for NZ real estate agents. Resaido keeps a record of what an agent has said about a property across the channels they say it in — the listing, the emails, the site visits — and flags it when one stops matching another. Brown's caveat was accurate on 30 July and out of date from 12 August, and nothing in his file said so. That's the gap.