Real estate agents fined $10k
Two Auckland Harcourts real estate agents found guilty of misconduct have been fined a total $10,000 for their failure to tell a state authority about $1.2 million of clients funds vanishing.
Joe Voordouw was fined $6000 and Garry Mason $4000 by the Real Estate Agents Disciplinary Tribunal. Both were censured but the tribunal said it did not consider an order for further education was needed.
The misconduct finding alone sent “a strong message to the industry”, the tribunal said.
The agents worked at the nowfailed Preet franchised operations owned and headed by Gurpreet Grewal who Harcourts Group has sued in the High Court at Auckland for $1.27m. The outcome of that case is pending.
Voordouw was branch manager of Harcourts Preet & Co in Ellerslie and Mason was chief operations officer based in Manukau, the tribunal said.
Last year, Voordouw signed a trust account statutory declaration about the balance of the agency’s funds. He was told $1m had been transferred from the agency’s trust account and into another account and purchase deposits had been put in the wrong bank account, it said. A further $200,000 was also found to be missing from the trust account.
Voordouw and Mason met Grewal to raise issues about the missing money and Voordouw made notes about a breach of the Real Estate Agents Act 2008 and “potentially fraud”.
The tribunal said he did not notify the Real Estate Authority, as he was bound to do under law. Instead, he emailed the auditor to “have a look at the trust account” which did not indicate the scale of the issue or any urgency, the tribunal said.
The tribunal found the men’s conduct in failing to report issues “constituted seriously incompetent and/or seriously negligent real estate agency work” under the law. They relied on the auditor to take steps but that did not absolve them from their obligations. They should have gone to greater lengths to make the auditor aware of the seriousness of the issues and the need for urgent investigation, the tribunal found.
The tribunal decided the men should have acted promptly but it cited mitigating factors, including the men’s long career in the industry and character references submitted to the tribunal. Both had earned excellent reputations for honesty, integrity and diligence, the tribunal found. They had both contributed significantly to the industry.