Auctioneers Act 2013

The Auctioneers Act 2013 is the main New Zealand law for registering auctioneers and setting some core operating rules for auction businesses. Its purpose is practical: it provides for the registration of auctioneers, deals with related matters, and repeals the older Auctioneers Act 1928.

For a business owner, the first question is usually simple. Are you carrying on business as an auctioneer, or are you using an auction-style process that falls outside the Act? The answer matters because registration is generally mandatory if you are in trade and charging for auction services, unless a specific exemption applies.

The Act is also broader than some people expect. It is not limited to a traditional auction room with a hammer and a crowd. It can apply where bids are placed with the auctioneer in real time in person, by telephone, via the Internet, or by other means. That means the law can reach in-person auctions, livestream auctions, phone bidding, and mixed formats.

Just as importantly, the Act is not only about getting registered. It also creates ongoing duties around annual confirmation, change notifications, and record-keeping. If your business sells property on behalf of vendors and handles sale proceeds, those day-to-day systems are where compliance risk often sits.

The Act defines an auction as a process where property of any kind is offered for sale by an auctioneer on behalf of a vendor, bids are placed with the auctioneer in real time, and the property is sold when the auctioneer indicates. The definition expressly includes goods, services, and interests in land.

That definition matters because many modern sales processes borrow auction language without necessarily being an auction under the Act. The Act says, to avoid doubt, that a process is not necessarily an auction just because it is described that way. It gives an example of an Internet process where any sale contract is directly between the winning bidder and the seller. In that example, the process is not an auction for the purpose of the Act.

For business owners, the practical lesson is not to rely on branding alone. Calling something an auction on your website or in your terms does not settle the legal position. You need to look at how the sale actually works. Is there an auctioneer? Are bids placed with that auctioneer in real time? Does the auctioneer indicate when the property is sold? Is the auctioneer acting on behalf of a vendor?

This is especially relevant for online platforms, marketplace operators, and businesses experimenting with hybrid sales models. A live online bidding event may fall within the Act. A platform that simply connects seller and buyer under a direct contract may not. The structure matters more than the label.

The key registration trigger is carrying on business as an auctioneer. Under the Act, a person carries on business as an auctioneer if, in trade, they charge a fee or commission for a sale by auction, or require payment of any part of the proceeds of the sale, other than as an employee or agent of a registered auctioneer.

In practical terms, if your business runs auctions for clients and earns money from doing so, registration will usually be required. This can apply whether the business is a sole trader or a company. It can also apply across different sectors, including general goods, specialist assets, secondhand goods, and some online or hybrid auction formats.

The employee or agent wording is important, but it should not be overread. It does not remove the need for the registered business itself to comply. If your company is the business carrying on auction activities in trade, the company still needs to be properly registered unless an exemption applies. The Act also separately restricts who a registered auctioneer may engage to conduct a sale on its behalf.

The Act is subject to exceptions under the Real Estate Agents Act 2008, the Motor Vehicle Sales Act 2003, and any other enactment. So if your business operates in land or motor vehicle auctions, you should check whether a specific exemption applies rather than assuming the general registration rule is the whole story.

If you want to carry on business as an auctioneer, you apply to the Registrar. The application must be in the required form if one is prescribed, include the required information and material, and include any prescribed fee.

The information required depends on whether the applicant is an individual or a company. For an individual, the application includes the person’s full name, residential address, date of birth, trading name or proposed trading name, principal business address, address for service, and a statement that the applicant is not disqualified from registration.

For a company, the application includes the company name, trading name or proposed trading name, principal business address, address for service, and the full name, residential address, and date of birth of each person concerned in the management of the company. It must also include a statement, made by a person concerned in the management of the company, that the company and each named manager is not disqualified from registration.

The address for service has its own rules. It must identify the place by street address, include fax number and email address if available, and must not be a PO Box or document exchange. That is a small detail, but it is the kind of detail that can slow down an application or create avoidable compliance issues later if your records are inconsistent.

If the Registrar accepts the application, the applicant is entered on the register and receives a registration certificate containing a unique registration number and the date of registration. If the application is refused, the Registrar must give written notice of the refusal and the reasons, and the applicant has a right of appeal to the District Court.

Not everyone can be registered. The Act sets out disqualification rules for both individuals and companies, and these rules are central to onboarding, governance, and annual compliance checks.

For individuals, disqualification includes being under 18, being an undischarged bankrupt, having had registration cancelled within the preceding 5 years, being prohibited from being a director or being concerned in management under an enactment or order, having certain recent convictions, being subject to certain real estate or motor vehicle sanctions, or being subject to certain property orders under the Protection of Personal and Property Rights Act 1988.

For companies, disqualification can arise if a person concerned in the management of the company is disqualified, if the company is not registered under the Companies Act 1993, if its registration under this Act has been cancelled within the preceding 5 years, if it has certain recent convictions, if it is subject to certain real estate or motor vehicle sanctions, if it is in liquidation, receivership, or voluntary administration, or if its name has been removed from the companies register.

For a small business, this means registration is not just an operations issue. It is also a governance issue. A new director or chief executive can affect eligibility. A change in company status can affect eligibility. If you use a company structure, your compliance process should include checks on the people concerned in management, not just the trading brand or front-line auction staff.

Registration does not continue indefinitely. Under the Act, registration expires 12 months from the date of registration unless it is renewed by supplying an annual confirmation, cancelled, or surrendered.

Every registered auctioneer must supply an annual confirmation of details to the Registrar. The annual confirmation must be in the required form if one is required by the Registrar, be accompanied by any prescribed fee, and confirm that the auctioneer is not disqualified from registration.

If the annual confirmation is not supplied before the anniversary of the registration date, the Registrar may assume the person is no longer carrying on business as an auctioneer and may amend the register accordingly. For a business owner, that is a practical warning sign. A missed renewal step can quickly become a trading risk if the business continues to operate on the assumption that registration is still current.

The safest approach is to treat annual confirmation as a fixed compliance event, not an admin task to deal with when time allows. Put the anniversary date into your compliance calendar, assign responsibility to a named person, and make sure the information needed for the confirmation is checked in advance. This is particularly important for companies, where management changes or status changes may affect what can properly be confirmed.

The Act also requires registered auctioneers to keep the Registrar updated. A registered auctioneer must notify the Registrar if the auctioneer becomes disqualified, if in the case of a company a person concerned in management becomes disqualified, if the auctioneer knows that details on the register are no longer correct, or if the auctioneer ceases to carry on business as an auctioneer.

That notification must be made within 10 working days after the relevant matter is known to the registered auctioneer. There is also a separate rule for companies when a new person becomes concerned in management. In that case, the registered auctioneer must, within 20 working days, notify the Registrar of that person’s full name, residential address, and date of birth, and send a statement confirming that the person is not disqualified from registration.

The Act also covers the application stage. If an applicant becomes aware, before receiving the decision on the application, that information in the application is not or is no longer true and correct, the applicant must notify the Registrar.

These rules matter because business details change often. Trading names change. Principal business addresses change. Directors and chief executives change. Businesses stop trading in one line and start another. The Act expects those changes to be reported promptly, not cleaned up later when someone notices a mismatch.

One of the most practical parts of the Act is the auctioneer record. Every registered auctioneer must keep an accurate and up-to-date auctioneer record. This is not optional paperwork. It is a core operating requirement that should be built into your sale workflow.

The record must include vendor information such as full name, date of birth, contact address, and contact telephone number if any. It must also record whether the vendor is selling in trade as a supplier within the meaning of the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993 or otherwise.

For the property and the auction, the record must include a description of the property, the date of the auction, the lot number if the property was auctioned by lot, whether the sale was subject to a reserve price, whether vendor bids were permitted, the name of the auctioneer who conducted the sale, the highest bid and whether it was a vendor bid, the sale price, the amount of proceeds paid to the vendor, and the date those proceeds were paid to the vendor.

The required information must be added as soon as practicable after it is available, and the information must be kept on the record for at least 3 years. For a business owner, that means your CRM, auction platform, settlement process, and document retention settings should all support these fields. If your system cannot capture them reliably, your compliance risk increases quickly.

The Act does not just require records to exist. It also says where they must be kept and who can inspect them. Every auctioneer record must be kept available for inspection at the address of the principal place where the registered auctioneer carries on business as an auctioneer.

On request at any reasonable time, the registered auctioneer must make the record available for inspection by a constable, an employee of the Commerce Commission who is authorised in writing to inspect auctioneer records, a vendor who sold property through the auctioneer in relation to the parts of the record that relate to that vendor and property, and the Registrar.

The registered auctioneer must also, on request, give any person who has a right to inspect the record a copy of any part of the record that they are entitled to inspect.

For small businesses, this has a practical systems angle. If your records are spread across email inboxes, spreadsheets, and personal devices, it may be difficult to produce the right information promptly and accurately. A better approach is to keep a central sale file for each auction and make sure the principal place of business can access the full record. That helps with vendor queries, regulator requests, and internal reconciliation after the sale.

The Act also restricts who a registered auctioneer may engage to conduct a sale on its behalf. A registered auctioneer must not engage an auctioneer to conduct a sale on the registered auctioneer’s behalf if that person is disqualified from registration.

This matters for businesses that use freelance auctioneers, contractors, or staff who move between related entities. The legal risk is not limited to your own registration status. It also extends to the people you put in front of bidders and vendors to conduct the sale.

In practice, this means onboarding should include eligibility checks before someone is engaged to conduct auctions. It also means those checks should not be a one-off exercise. If a person’s circumstances change and they become disqualified, continuing to use them can create problems for the registered auctioneer that engaged them.

For companies, this sits alongside the management notification rules. A business can have one set of compliance checks for people concerned in management and another for people who actually conduct auctions, but both need to be covered. If your operating model relies on contractors or casual auctioneers, this is an area where a simple written screening process can reduce risk significantly.

The offence provisions in the Act cover both serious dishonesty and more routine compliance failures. The most serious offence is fraudulent conduct involving sale proceeds or false accounts to the vendor. A person commits an offence if they fraudulently retain the proceeds of property sold at auction, fraudulently fail to pay the correct balance to the vendor, or, with intent to defraud the vendor, give a false account of the sale.

The Act also creates offences for carrying on business as an auctioneer while unregistered, holding out as being a registered auctioneer while not registered, engaging a person to conduct an auction while knowing that person is disqualified, making a materially false statement to the Registrar in connection with registration or confirmation, failing to comply with the notification obligations, and failing to comply with the record-keeping requirements.

For a business owner, the practical point is that compliance failures are not limited to dramatic misconduct. A missed registration step, an inaccurate statement to the Registrar, or weak record systems can also create legal exposure. The businesses most at risk are often those with informal admin processes, unclear responsibility for compliance, or poor reconciliation of vendor proceeds after the sale.

Vendor money, sale reporting, and registration status should therefore be treated as core controls. They are not side issues. They are central to lawful operation under the Act.

If you are building or scaling an auction business, the Act should be reflected in your systems and documents from the start. Your registration should match the legal entity actually carrying on the business. Your trading name, principal place of business, address for service, website details, invoices, and vendor-facing documents should line up with that entity and its registered details.

Before each sale, confirm the structure of the transaction. Is the business acting on behalf of a vendor? Are bids being placed with an auctioneer in real time? Is the sale one where the auctioneer indicates when the property is sold? If the answer is yes, the Act may apply unless a statutory exemption changes the position.

After the sale, complete the auctioneer record promptly, record the highest bid and sale price accurately, and make sure the proceeds paid to the vendor and payment date are captured. If your business uses multiple channels, such as in-room bidding plus online bidding, make sure the final record still sits in one complete file.

If you operate in land or motor vehicle auctions, remember that the Act itself points to exemptions under the Real Estate Agents Act 2008 and the Motor Vehicle Sales Act 2003. Those exemptions do not mean auction conduct issues disappear. The Schedule also shows links with Fair Trading Act auction conduct rules in those sectors. In other words, the registration question and the conduct question are related, but they are not the same thing.