Companies Office records show Ria Leung is the sole director and shareholder of the business but Hunt said he has yet to quantify the scale of debts or assets.
Make it your business to know
Start your day with the latest business headlines straight to your inbox.Hunt said Leung was not only selling property but also selling businesses, especially to the Chinese community.
“She had staff in the past but not recently,” he said.
Century 21′s head office had terminated arrangements with her for non-payment of fees, Hunt said. That had occurred in the last two months and since then the agency had not operated.
Inquiries to Century 21 about the liquidation resulted in a director Tim Kearins saying he “would rather not comment”.
However another executive stressed that each Century 21 office was independently owned and operated.
Century 21 says the New Zealand-owned arm of the worldwide network was established in 1992 and later purchased by current chairman and owner Charles Tarbey in February 2012.
Real Estate Authority records show Leung has Auroa Commercial NZ of Christchurch and Global Realty Investment of Kaikōura. Global Realty is a residential sales, commercial letting and leasing, rural sales and business broking company, according to the REA portal.
Leung has no disciplinary history, the authority’s site shows. She has been approached for comment.
The Century 21 agency failure is not the first lately.
Earlier this year, two companies that operated a real estate sales and property management agency under the Harcourts banner were put into liquidation, with the owner forming a new business to carry on and saying nothing had changed.
Pinnacle Real Estate and Pinnacle Real Estate Rentals, trading as Harcourts Pinnacle, are both in liquidation.
They are owned by Rasheed Muhammed and traded from the agency’s offices on Pavilion Dr, Māngere.
Mohammad Jan of Liquidation Management told the Herald that Harcourts Pinnacle continued to operate but under a new company formed last September called Pinnacle Realty.
All the activities of the previous two companies were now being performed by that new company so business was proceeding as normal, he stressed.
In a second case reported in April, shareholders in an Auckland real estate agency declared insolvency, blaming “a big downturn” in house sales, high staff costs and debt for the firm’s failure estimated to be more than $700,000.
Boris van Delden and Iain McLennan of McDonald Vague liquidated Client First Realty, owned by Tarragon [known as Dylan] Mann, Brook Mann and Ben Wickins.
That agency had a connection with Harcourts and appeared under Companies Office records as trading as Harcourts Client First.
Sole director Dylan Mann told the accountants what led to the liquidation.
“The director has attributed the failure of the company to a big downturn in the real estate industry. He said that high staff costs and outgoings and a lack of sales meant there was insufficient income to cover debt,” the first McDonald Vague report said.
Anne Gibson has been the Herald’s property editor for 24 years, written books and covered property extensively here and overseas.
.png)
