Every year I must be one of the most enthusiastic readers of the REA Annual Report. Given Wynn Williams’ work defending licensees in court and in the REA Complaints process, I’m interested mostly in the complaints statistics which are published.

For the past two years we’ve seen complaints fall. My 2022 and 2023 articles reported complaints at record lows of 271 and 252 complaints respectively. The new report for the last year has just been released; complaints are back up again to 361, a 41% increase on last year. So, 109 more property-transaction-related complaints this year than in 2023 – which is the equivalent of about nine more complaints a month.

It’s often a mistake to look for cast-iron explanations of data like this, but that’s a big percentage increase. Could the following factors have contributed?

• More property transactions as the market picks up again?
• Lending becoming marginally easier with interest rates lowering – are banks loosening up on lending and people no longer required to do as much due diligence, instead relying more on agents’ representations?
• Complaints trickling through after a volatile period for the property market?

It wouldn’t be sensible to conclude that real estate agents got objectively worse in 2023. The REA makes this point in its analysis:

“A number of the complaints received related to low-level issues that did not justify regulatory intervention.”

Perhaps the change is not in the industry or licensees, but with the public being more willing to complain. Certainly, the REA is far more focused on facilitating complaints about its members than any other regulator. The first two tabs on the REA homepage both relate to complaints. Compared with other professional regulators (eg, Chartered Accountants NZICA, Engineering New Zealand, NZ Registered Architects Board or NZ Law Society), it is far easier to access information about complaints from the REA. This easy access to complaints does probably encourage people who log on for information to instead report low-level issues. Having said this, the website is unchanged from the past couple of years when complaints were lower.

In summary, the big rise in complaints this year is probably just “one of those things”. But we’ll be watching the stats for next year with interest.