Two agents each told a buyer something that turned out to be untrue. Both believed it. Neither set out to deceive. One was censured and fined; the other walked away with no finding against him.
Side by side, the two decisions are almost mirror images — which makes them the cleanest way I’ve seen to show where r 6.4, the rule against misleading or providing false information, actually bites. It bites somewhere other than most agents think.
The one that went nowhere
A 1970s two-storey house with a downstairs room the owners had used as a bedroom for decades. The agent advertised four bedrooms, counting it. After settlement the buyer discovered the room sat well below ground level, had no window, and didn’t meet the standard for a habitable bedroom — and after heavy rain, it leaked. She complained: concealment, misrepresentation.
The Tribunal upheld nothing. Not because the agent got lucky, but because of a specific chain of evidence. The vendors had bought the house as a four-bedroom. The agency agreement said four bedrooms. They’d raised a child in that room. The buyer’s own building report called it a bedroom, with photos of it carpeted and furnished as one. The house pre-dated the building consent regime, so the absence of a consent record wasn’t a red flag. Everything pointing the other way — an architect’s plan, later reports — was created after settlement.
When the agent said “bedroom,” every document in front of him said the same thing.
The one that didn’t
A small retail premises sold at auction, advertised at a fixed net annual return. That was the contracted rent. But a buyer of commercial property isn’t buying a lease — she’s buying a cash flow. In the year before the auction the landlord had quietly granted the tenant pandemic rent relief, so the rent actually received came in nearly ten thousand dollars short of the advertised figure.
The agent didn’t know about the relief. The Tribunal accepted that — innocent, no deceit. He lost anyway.
He lost because he never checked. He never asked the owner whether the rent had in fact been paid. Worse, the owner’s bank statements had been sitting in his inbox for a month before the auction, and they showed the shortfall plainly. He didn’t hide them. He “carelessly sat on them” — held them, didn’t read them. That alone breached r 5.1 (skill, care and diligence).
Where the line actually is
The Tribunal applied the High Court’s test from Vosper: a breach of r 6.4 needs something more than an erroneous statement based on a genuine belief. Believing it isn’t the question. What you believed it on is.
The bedroom agent’s belief stood on a row of independent sources — vendor, written agency agreement, the buyer’s own inspection. That’s foundation. He wasn’t inventing anything; he was repeating a description three separate sources had confirmed.
The rent agent’s belief stood on a single lease — while the document that flatly contradicted it sat unopened in his own inbox. That’s not thin foundation. That’s a contradiction in hand, said out loud anyway.
So both “got it wrong,” and they’re nothing alike. One repeated an accurate-looking description supported by everything reasonably available, and only learned later the information itself was off. The other failed to ask what he should have asked, failed to read what he was holding, and said it anyway — repeatedly. The first is the honest agent r 6.4 is built to protect. The second is the one it’s built to catch.
The part people miss
In the rent case the agent didn’t only misstate the rent. He also called a tenant of barely over a year “longstanding,” and gave a misleading yield figure at the auction. The Tribunal found both misleading — and found neither to be unsatisfactory conduct.
Misleading and disciplinable are two gates, not one. The second is materiality: did it bear on the deal, was it serious enough to warrant a response. “Longstanding” was held to be of no moment, since nothing showed the lease was unstable. The yield line was a one-off, spoken, and correct looking forward. Only the rent cleared both gates — repeated, in writing, decisive to the bid, and built on nothing.
Which is the more uncomfortable lesson. “Not unsatisfactory conduct” isn’t a safe place to live. You can sit squarely on the line of yes, misleading — but not this time, and the same habit, attached to a material fact, tips you over.
For agents
1. “I genuinely believed it” is not a defence. The question isn’t whether you believed it — it’s what you can point to. Every statement that moves a buyer (area, room status, rent, yield, consent) needs a source you can name.
2. A document in your possession is a document you’ve read. “Didn’t get to it” and “read it and ignored it” are the same thing in a decision. Receiving it is the obligation.
3. One source isn’t enough when it’s easy to contradict. The rent agent trusted the lease alone. The bedroom agent was safe because vendor, agency agreement and an independent inspection all said the same thing.
4. Leave a trail of why you said it. The bedroom agent won partly because, after the fact, he could still produce a clean paper chain showing the description was reasonable at the time. Having a basis and being able to prove you had one are different problems.
5. Timeline is everything. You’re judged on what you knew at settlement, not what surfaced later. The flip side: every document that reached you before settlement becomes something you “should have known.”
Why I’m building Resaido
The rent case is the kind of failure I built Resaido for. The agent didn’t lose because he was dishonest. He lost because a contradiction that should have been caught — the figure he kept repeating against the figure in his own file — went unflagged for a month. Ask a person to hold that comparison in their head across a few hundred emails and a few dozen documents, and it slips.
That comparison is the whole job: what an agent says, across channels and over time, checked against what the file actually holds, with the gap surfaced the moment it opens. Rent against bank statements. “Longstanding” against the lease start date. “Four bedrooms” against the consent record. None of these needs legal judgement to spot — they’re structural mismatches.
And the cases hand me the standard. Whether a statement is safe comes down to its foundation, and foundation is structurable: for every material representation, can you trace it back to a source in the file? If yes, you’re on the bedroom side. If no — or if the file holds the contradiction — you’re on the rent side. Putting that in front of an agent before they hit send, instead of in front of a Tribunal two years later, is where this thing earns its place.
Field Notes is my running read through the decisions that quietly set the standard in New Zealand property — the disciplinary record most people never open. One case at a time, what I take from it, and how it shapes what I build. More soon.