Real estate agent wins nightmare legal fight

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PHOTO: Real estate agent. Image by rawpixel.com

According to the NZHERALD an Auckland real estate agent says he has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting an 11-year legal pursuit by blogger Dermot Nottingham, which has just been declared a vexatious abuse of process by a court.

“I wasn’t going to give in to a bully,” estate agent Martin Honey said in expressing relief at finally beating Nottingham in the Court of Appeal.

Nottingham is a former activist and blogger who at one time served home detention for criminal harassment of five other people. Their names were suppressed.

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He was bankrupted in 2018 when he failed to pay costs after attempting, and losing, a private prosecution of Honey and two other people.

The legal dispute began in 2011, when Nottingham complained to the Real Estate Agents Authority, alleging Honey had misled the public and caused a loss to a company Nottingham was associated with.

The Real Estate Agents Disciplinary Tribunal ruled in Honey’s favour, but this started what the Appeal Court called a “long-standing and tortuous dispute” that continued through the tribunal and successive District Court, High Court, and Appeal Court actions.

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“It just goes to show what you can do through the court system – just keep taking things back to court,” Honey told Open Justice.

Asked if the matter was now finished, Honey said there was always the chance of Nottingham appealing to the Supreme Court, “but good luck with that when you’ve got three judges slamming him like they did”.

Honey said that years of being pursued through the courts had an impact on his personal life and business and caused a lot of stress.

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“It’s horrible. It’s like your worst nightmare,” Honey said. “And he said right at the beginning to me, that he would become my worst nightmare.”

But Honey added: “I was never going to give in to him. It cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s good to finally be through it. You start to lose faith in the justice system but after I read that [Appeal Court decision] … I was really happy.”

In the final Court of Appeal matter, Nottingham, his brother Phillip Nottingham and an associate, Robert Earle McKinney, sought the court’s direction on matters to be considered to continue the case in the disciplinary tribunal.