A BC real estate agent who allowed strangers into a home without authorized 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 wrongdoing in 2021 in a proposed consent order submitted to the Financial Services Authority of BC, which was published on its website on October 16.

The document details how Kim, a licensed real estate agent with Evergreen West Realty Inc. of Coquitlam, was representing clients interested in a Langley property when she let her husband pose as a real estate agent for her. When questioned about the incident, Kim provided misleading information to investigators during “multiple interviews,” the BCFSA said.

During the May 2021 show, the property owner noticed Kim missing while monitoring a home surveillance camera attached to the front door. Instead of Kim welcoming her clients – a couple and two children – into the house, it had been an unknown man.

According to the consent order, when the seller texted Kim to ask if she was home with the customers, Kim insisted she was, but asked the customer to open the door for her.

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

The document described how the seller, by then already close to the house, had stopped by the property to check if Kim was present and arrived as the family was pulling out of the driveway.

The salesman had stopped them and asked to speak to Kim. The woman in the car had said she was Kim, but when the seller looked it up online, the woman he had seen and the woman listed online as Kim did not match.

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

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

In the consent order, Kim admitted to professional misconduct by failing to “act with reasonable care and skill” in failing to accompany clients to property showings.

Kim also “failed to act in the best interest of their clients” by allowing an unlicensed person to provide real estate services and “provided false or misleading information by providing various oral and written statements regarding the property,” including whether she attended or not the reason why he did not participate, it is shown.

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

“The BCFSA will take further disciplinary action against individuals who mislead investigators or otherwise fail to cooperate during investigations and do not act in the best interests of their clients.”

As punishment for her misconduct, Kim agreed to suspend her license for six months. She also agreed to pay the BCFSA a disciplinary penalty of $10,000 within three months of the date of the consent order and enforcement costs of $4,000 within two months of the date of the consent order.