Hayes John: Real Estate Agents Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Hayes John: Real Estate Agents Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:649;Page:18430] 
JOHN HAYES (National—Wairarapa) 
: 
 This legislation is opposed by the National Party not because we do not want good legislation to apply to the industry but because I can assure members that the majority of the real estate agents in my Wairarapa electorate are seriously opposed to many of the provisions of this bill. They also took considerable umbrage at being invited by the chair of the Justice and Electoral Committee Ms Pillay to come and make representations to the committee and after driving for an hour and a half from Masterton being invited to appear before the committee for 5 minutes only to face another hour and a half drive back to Masterton. That is at best totally rude and arrogant treatment by a Government that I hope our community will be putting the skids under. 
In my view the legislation in Part 5 is faulty and reflective of our typical nanny State over-prescriptive attitude to developing legislation in this country. Let me give the example of clause 119 “Money to be held by agent for 10 working days”. As someone who has bought and sold the odd property during his life I can say that it is often absolutely out of the question that one would want to enter into a transaction that leaves the money sitting dead in an account for 10 working days. GST for example may apply to the transaction and because of the phasing-in of GST income and payment arrangements it may be entirely inappropriate to keep this requirement for money to be held by the agent for 10 working days. 
However it is entirely appropriate that agents’ trust accounts should be audited as provided for in clause 121. I have no difficulty with that at all. But I turn to the provisions concerning agency agreements—in particular clause 124 “No entitlement to commission or expenses without agency agreement”. As in my colleague Colin King’s electorate down in Marlborough a lot of transactions in my electorate of the Wairarapa are made on the basis of word-of-mouth trust between people who know each other. Very many transactions are never actually put on paper. At the moment I am involved in a transaction with a land agent that has nothing on paper. Each party entirely trusts the other to act in an honourable way. We do not need the over-prescription that is coming from a Government that is trying to prescribe the detail around every breath of every individual for his or her life and his or her behaviour in that life. 
It also strikes me as very strange that a client can cancel a sole-agency arrangement by 5 p.m. on the next working day. What would be the difference between cancelling it then and cancelling it on the spot? Why are we engaged in interfering in the multitude of possible transactions between people and between individuals? The law cannot ever prescribe in detail the behaviour between two people. This legislation is attempting to over-prescribe and over-regulate behaviour. 
It is of concern to National that auctioneering is removed from this legislation. Many transactions around property in the Wairarapa involve auctioning; it does not matter whether we are dealing with farm properties residential properties business properties livestock or other bits and pieces of agricultural material. 
I think it is also of concern that we should be winding up the Real Estate Agents Fidelity Guarantee Fund because I was caught up in this sort of problem myself 20 years ago with the lawyers’ fidelity fund where a particular lawyer who was representing me banked some money that was owed to me as if it was his own. When one comes to seek the guarantee of these funds it is actually quite hard to extract the payments from these bodies even though one has been done down by a professional person. I think it is quite appropriate that there should be some arrangement so that if agents transgress the small people in the community are able to recover some sort of compensation for being done down by somebody else. I will finish at this point but I reiterate that there is strong opposition to this bill amongst the real estate agents in my electorate and I do not support voting for it.