Barfoot & Thompson sacks employee over house sales leak   15 Jul 2015

Barfoot & Thompson sacks employee over house sales leak

By Fiona Rotherham

July 15 (BusinessDesk) - Barfoot & Thompson, Auckland’s largest real estate agency, has sacked a staff member for leaking confidential house sales data that led to a furore over Chinese house buying.

The company launched an investigation after the Weekend Herald published details of house sales which identified buyers as Chinese from their surname. The figures were based on house sales data of 3,922 Auckland sales from February to April.

The Labour Party extrapolated from Asian-sounding names on the list that Chinese buyers accounted for about 39.5 percent of buyers, compared to 9 percent of Auckland’s population.

Given the sales volumes, Barfoot suspected its data had been leaked and launched an investigation, which led to the sacking of the staff member. The realtor won’t release any details about the staff member or their motivation.

The investigation showed that the weekly sales data had been leaked over several months, and had been sent to a number of people, including media, but not directly to the Labour Party.

The investigation is ongoing, including whether any other staff members were involved.

Managing director Peter Thompson said the decision wasn’t taken lightly, but was a basic condition of employment of Barfoot staff that information concerning clients is “without exception treated with the utmost confidentiality and can't be disclosed or discussed with other people.”

He said the investigation showed conclusively that in this case a line had been crossed.

Chief executive Wendy Alexander said they’d had contact form a number of clients concerned about whether their confidential data had been compromised, but she said expected it to have little impact on the business.

In her personal view, there was unwarranted attention on the issue of Asian buyers, Alexander said.

Barfoot had a strong level of inquiry from Chinese buyers, but there was “nothing unusual, unique, or scary in that, and good on them,” she said.

Thompson said he was disappointed that one person out of the realtor's 2,000 staff jeopardised a whole company.

(BusinessDesk)

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