Real estate regulation in New Zealand is built on a simple premise: licensed people, audited trust accounts, a regulator watching. This week’s news shows the premise has a hole in it, and vendors and buyers are the ones standing over it.
Stuff reports that the founder of Silo Real Estate, who claims $1 billion in sales and a Forbes nod, is unlicensed, awaiting sentencing for fraud, and fronting a company now under investigation by the Real Estate Authority (REA). The backstory includes name changes and moves between Australia and New Zealand. The marketing is loud. The regulatory response has been comparatively quiet.
This is not just a fringe problem
It would be comforting to file Silo under colourful outliers. A second Stuff story, published the same week, makes that harder. A licensed agent allegedly secretly helped her husband try to buy a client’s $1.28 million property without disclosing the conflict. That is a textbook breach of the duty an agent owes the person paying them.
One case sits outside the licensing system, the other inside it. Together they point to the same thing. Trust in a real estate transaction depends on who is actually making decisions, and the paperwork does not always tell you.
The regulator’s numbers look better than the reality feels
By its own metrics, the REA runs a tidy system. In 2025, it reported that formal complaints rose 35%, from 361 to 487 in the 2024/25 year, which it attributed to challenging market conditions. Its 2024/25 annual report also showed that only 9% of licensees subject to a complaint outcome were found guilty of unsatisfactory conduct or misconduct.
That 9% figure can be read two ways. Either most complaints are about service gripes rather than wrongdoing, or the threshold for a finding is high enough that plenty of poor behaviour washes through. Probably some of both. Top complaint themes included disclosure and misleading advertising, which is exactly the territory where branding-heavy operators live.
When the REA does lay charges, it tends to win. Its compliance statistics, published in 2025, stated that since 2010 91% of misconduct charges laid with the Disciplinary Tribunal resulted in a disciplinary finding. The machinery works on people inside the net. The problem is an unlicensed individual sits outside the charge-laying process altogether, which leaves the regulator chasing the company rather than the person running it.
Licensing is necessary, not sufficient
This debate is not new. In 2023, when property manager licensing was on the table, lawyer Joanna Pidgeon observed that “there has been a move towards regulating people who hold other people’s money”. The then-chairman of the Residential Property Managers Association, David Pearse, pushed back, noting theft had occurred even within audited trust accounts and warning that “trust accounts will not necessarily create the outcome expected”.
Pearse was arguing against more regulation, but his point cuts both ways. Rules and audits set a floor. They do not stop a determined bad actor, and they do not tell a client who holds the real influence in a business.
Trust account safety has been a recurring worry for years. Back in 2017, after problems at a Harcourts franchise, the then-head of the regulator offered the qualified reassurance that “we should have no problems” as long as everyone followed the rules. The caveat was always the point.
The stakes are higher than consumer annoyance. Academic analysis published in 2024 described real estate agents as “gatekeeper professions” under anti-money-laundering law, precisely because NZ property has previously been used to wash money. A gatekeeper system that cannot see who controls the gate is not much of one.
What clients should do now
The answer is not another layer of bureaucracy. The REA already has the powers it needs, and piling on compliance costs for honest agencies would punish the wrong people. What is needed is faster, visible enforcement against operators who trade on credibility they have not earned.
In the meantime, business owners selling property, commercial buyers and investors should treat an agency like any other counterparty handling large sums. Check that the individuals involved, not just the company, hold current personal licences on the public register. Ask who owns and directs the business. Search for pending court matters against principals. Ask directly whether the agent or anyone connected to them has an interest in the deal.
The Silo case will play out in sentencing and in the REA’s investigation. The real test is how quickly the regulator can act when the person behind the brand never held a licence to lose. Until that answer is clearer, the burden of due diligence sits with the client.
Sources
- Stuff: Unlicensed real estate boss faces fraud sentencing as REA probes firm (2026-10-18)
- Stuff: Real estate agent secretly helped husband try to buy client’s $1.28m property (2026-10-17)
- REA: REA reports increase in complaints in 2024/25 challenging market conditions (2025-11-14)
- REA: 2025 Real Estate Authority Annual Report (2025-06-30)
- REA: Compliance statistics (2025-11-30)
- Springer: Money Laundering Through Real Estate – Why, and How, New Zealand has Sought to Regulate It (2024-09-11)
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