Real estate agent fined $14K for allowing husband to provide licensed services

A "For Sale" sign is seen in an undated Shutterstock image.

A B.C. real estate agent who allowed strangers to access a home without licensed supervision, and then lied when questioned about it later, is facing a $14,000 fine and a six-month suspension.

Yoo Kyung (Ashley) Kim admitted to the 2021 misconduct in a consent order proposal submitted to the B.C. Financial Services Authority, which was published on its website Oct. 16.

The document details how Kim, a licensed Realtor with Evergreen West Realty Inc. in Coquitlam, had been representing clients interested in a Langley property when she let her husband pose as an estate agent in her place. When investigated about the incident, Kim provided misleading information to investigators during “several interviews,” said the BCFSA.

During the showing in May of 2021, the owner of the property had noted Kim was missing while monitoring a home surveillance camera attached to the front door. Rather than Kim welcoming her clients – a couple and two children – into the home, it had been an unknown man.

According to the consent order, when the seller texted Kim to ask if she was at the home with the clients, Kim insisted that she was but had asked the client to open the door for her.

The seller’s agent tried to call and Facetime Kim, but was ignored.

The document described how the seller, at the time already close to the home, had swung by the property to check if Kim was present and had arrived as the family had been pulling out of its driveway.

The seller had stopped them and asked to speak to Kim. The woman in the car had said she was Kim, but when the seller looked her up on the internet, the woman she had seen and the woman listed online as Kim didn’t match.

In a telephone interview with the BCFSA, “Kim confirmed that she was with her buyer clients at the property during the showing, and that she let her buyer clients into the property,” the document reads.

When the BCFSA told Kim there was surveillance video showing her absence during the viewing, “Kim stated that her husband, unlicensed to provide real estate services, let her buyer clients in the property, and she herself was in the car because she was sick with COVID,” it reads.

In the consent order, Kim admitted to committing professional misconduct by failing to “act with reasonable care and skill” by not accompanying the clients to the showing of the property.

Kim had also “failed to act in the best interest of their clients” by allowing an unlicensed person to provide real estate services and had “provided false or misleading information by providing different statements orally and in writing regarding the property,” including about whether she did or did not attend and her reason for not attending, it reads.

“A licensee being dishonest during a BCFSA investigation significantly compounds the severity of the misconduct,” said Raheel Humayun, director of investigations at the BCFSA, in a news release about the case.

“BCFSA will take additional disciplinary action against individuals that mislead investigators or otherwise fail to co-operate during investigations, and do not conduct themselves in accordance with their clients’ best interests.”

As punishment for her misconduct, Kim agreed to have her licence suspended for six months. She also agreed to pay a discipline penalty of $10,000 to the BCFSA within three months of the date of the consent order, and enforcement expenses of $4,000 within two months of the date of the consent order.