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A Canley Heights agent has been slapped with an $80,000 fine following an NSW Rental Taskforce investigation that revealed widespread malpractice across the state since its launch a month ago.
The NSW Rental Taskforce has been in full swing since its establishment last month and helped expose a Canley Heights agent who stole more than $100,000 from rental bonds and a client trust account.
On 7 March 2025, Parramatta Local Court ordered real estate agent Vanessa Nguyen to pay over $80,000 in compensation for dishonestly taking more than $100,000 from NSW Rental Bonds and a trust account managed at Ray White Canley Heights.
An NSW Fair Trading investigation revealed that Nguyen made 25 rental bond claims totalling more than $50,000 and transferred $50,505 from the agency’s trust account to her personal account on 14 separate occasions.
Nguyen pleaded guilty and was convicted of two offences of dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception.
Parramatta Local Court then sentenced Nguyen to a 15-month intensive correction order, with an order to complete 180 hours of community service and pay $80,866.20 for trust fund misuse.
In December last year, First National Parramatta property manager, Rachel Fares, was sentenced to a 12-month community corrections order for misusing funds from rental bonds.
Fares pleaded guilty to one charge of fraud for misappropriating over $1,800 worth of rental bonds and one charge of money laundering after she received approximately $7,400 in circumstances where there were reasonable grounds to suspect it was the proceeds of a crime.
Earlier in October, another property manager at First National Parramatta, Matthew Rizk, was found to have misappropriated approximately $15,436 related to rental bonds.
For this one count of fraud under the NSW Crimes Act, Rizk was sentenced to an 18-month community corrections order with 40 hours of community service.
Another investigation by the NSW Rental Taskforce revealed that an online rental application platform had charged more than 2,300 rental applicants for background checks, which allegedly occurred due to a system error.
The affected rental applicants were charged $19.95 for a search of public databases and the National Tenancy Database, which violated rental laws passed in October 2024 that banned landlords from making applicants pay for background checks.
Following taskforce investigation, the platform voluntarily issued refunds totalling $47,321 to renters and disabled the background check feature on its website in NSW, while committing to periodic reviews to ensure future compliance.
Minister for Better Regulation and Fair Trading, Anoulack Chanthivong, said that the return of the incorrect charges back to renters showed that the taskforce had already “hit the ground running and is doing the job it was set up to do”.
Chanthivong added that these outcomes highlighted the Rental Taskforce’s no-nonsense stance towards malpractice in the real estate sector.
“The significant prosecutions and punishments we are seeing for real estate agents also shows that the message is clear – if you are doing the wrong thing, the Rental Taskforce will catch you and serious legal consequences will follow,” he concluded.
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