Hon Christopher Finlayson

Part 5 Duties relating to real estate agency work

CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON (National) : Part 5 deals with the duties relating to real estate agency work, and I want to take a call on just a couple of matters. The first is clause 117A, which requires the agent to display certain information. That provision is picked up from section 53 of the 1976 Act. It requires that every agent must clearly exhibit a notice of his or her name and the fact that he or she is a real estate agent licensed under the Act, at his or her place of business.

One issue that arose is what happens if people do not have an office as such. If they have an office, clause 117A(2)(a) requires that that information be provided there. What if they operate out of a car and they simply have signs that they put up outside an apartment block, if they are selling an apartment block, or outside a house—and we see all these signs around the place at the weekends? Are they required to comply with clause 117A? My understanding is that they are required to do so, so some changes may need to be made to the notices that they put up if they are working out of their car at the weekend.

The purpose of this clause is to require this information to be shown on notices, advertisements, and other publications that are issued by, or on behalf of, the agency or the agent. As the report of the Justice and Electoral Committee says, this will, hopefully, promote transparency and help to protect consumers by ensuring that information about the agent is readily available. So that is why that provision was inserted, and on its own we have no particular problem with that.

The second point I want to make is to reiterate the excellent points made by Mr Roy and Mr King about the requirements where the land is sold by auction. There were a number of submissions on those particular provisions, and I am referring to clauses 136 to 141. As can be seen from the clauses, some of them are derived from the Property, Stock and Business Agents Act 2002 of New South Wales. The evidence we received from submitters was that these were designed for a particular problem that had occurred in New South Wales some years ago, thus necessitating the legislation, and they did not really fit into the New Zealand legislation. We made that point, and if one reads the National Party minority report, one will see that we said we thought the auction bidders record was impractical. We have heard this afternoon from several of my colleagues that this regime would not have worked at all, and that it would have been cumbersome and, frankly, silly.

Even though we are concerned about various aspects of the bill that remain, we are pleased that the Minister has heard what we were saying and has ignored his colleagues on the Justice and Electoral Committee. This proposal would not have worked and we are very pleased that it has been deleted. Because we need to get on with other parts of the bill and deal with the title and the third reading, I will not detain the Committee any further on Part 5. I just wanted to bring the Committee’s attention to those two matters.