A well-known real estate agent has appeared before a disciplinary committee of the New Brunswick Real Estate Association, accused of hiding his financial interest in a property he listed for sale and falsely advertising the home as brand new.
Jason Munn has been in the real estate business for close to 30 years and leads a brokerage firm that includes more than 40 agents under the Re/ Max East Coast Elite brand.
He’s fighting the unusual allegations, which, if proven to be true, could see him suspended or kicked out of the real estate association and fined up to $5,000.
His accusers include two of his former team members who are themselves top agents for the same real estate firm.
Rebecca Steeves and her daughter, Hannah Steeves-Carney, left East Coast Elite following the controversy over the sale two years ago of a more than half million-dollar home in Taymouth, a quiet, rural community north of Fredericton.
The complaint is also driven by their clients, first-time home buyers originally from Ontario who, according to testimony before the disciplinary hearing, were anxious about the purchase.
Munn’s defence lawyer, meanwhile, suggested through his questioning that the case could really be about professional jealousy, with one top agent pitted against another.
The story is laid out in documents examined by the five-person disciplinary committee and from witnesses it heard on Thursday and Friday of last week.
Benjamin Amdur, an RCMP officer who serves in Doaktown, and his partner, Isabelle Piché, a dispatch operator for the Mounties in Fredericton, saw a home advertised in 2024 that checked all their boxes.
“What a beautiful home!” stated the ad on realtor.ca. “Custom, brand new, nine-foot ceilings, just a stone’s throw to the City of Fredericton with over 2,200 square feet finished with an attached insulated dream garage measuring 26 by 38.”
But as the couple would soon learn, not everything about the property was brand new.
A decrepit home on the same site had been razed, and the new home erected on the old foundation, according to uncontested facts presented to the panel.
The “dream garage” was an old garage, renovated and dressed up to look like the rest of the home with a newly attached breezeway, Munn acknowledged.
The septic was new, but the well was from the old home and failed a lab test. The analysis showed the well water had unacceptable levels of coliform bacteria and lead, according to documents before the panel.
Piché testified before the disciplinary hearing’s panel last Thursday that she and her partner wanted a new home because they didn’t want to deal with the repair issues of an older home and were very concerned about resale value.
After the couple visited the home with their real estate agent, Steeves-Carney, a couple of times, and thinking it was “brand new from ground zero,” they decided to make an offer of $507,000, below the asking price of $529,000, Piché said.
“We loved the layout. It was bright and open, a really nice property,” she testified.
But soon enough, the couple would find out not everything appeared as it seemed.
During her testimony on Thursday, Steeves-Carney said she did her own research and found out the civic number had changed at some point, prompting her to dig deeper.
She told the panel she had learned that a company named J and J Smart Move was a mortgage holder on the property.
This raised an alarm bell because she knew that Munn, the owner of the brokerage firm where he was working, East Coast Elite, was also the co-owner of J and J Smart Move with his wife. In the real estate world, it’s considered unethical not to disclose that you have a financial interest in a property if you are acting on behalf of a seller.
Steeves-Carney sent a text to Munn asking him to sign a disclosure form. Initially, he resisted, stating that he wasn’t really the owner and that he had only lent money to the seller, a builder named Michael Hodgin, who owns MCI Hodgin Construction.
But the records show that after she reminded him by text a second time of his obligation, he signed the disclosure form.
Doing her homework, the real estate agent acting for the couple said she also found out the property had an old well.
That’s when her mother and real estate teammate entered the picture. Steeves testified before the committee that she agreed to go to Taymouth to help her daughter because she used to work in a lab and knew how to take water samples.
Steeves said when she was putting her shoes back on while sitting on the front step, she noticed something that didn’t look right on the garage. Upon further inspection, she said she saw some rotting wood poking from underneath the siding.
They would soon learn from Munn, she testified, that the foundation was old, and the garage was pre-existing.
However, upon being informed of this news, including the failed lab test, the couple didn’t walk away.
Instead, they tried to re-negotiate their initial offer. Among the conditions, they wanted an expensive system put in that would eliminate pollutants from the water, something Piché said would make the house acceptable to them, despite all the new information they had learned.
But the deal crumbled when an independent inspection report showed other minor deficiencies with the home. Piché said it was all just too much.
Hodgin, the builder and seller, testified he wouldn’t budge on his price, and he quickly accepted a higher backup offer on the house from another interested buyer.
Piché complained the ordeal was “upsetting” and “felt sketchy” and that it seemed like the seller and his agent were “trying to hide things from us to get us to buy our first property.”
“It felt like someone was trying to trick us,” she told the committee.
But Munn, who has successfully completed more than 3,000 real estate transactions over the years, testified that he hadn’t misrepresented the sale and always followed the maxim that he would treat anyone in business the way he would want to be treated, fairly.
On the loan, he explained that he and the builder were old friends and had often worked together on the sale of new homes. In this case, he had lent Hodgin money, in two installments, $150,000, assuming he was putting it toward the mortgage of another property he had been working on in nearby Penniac.
Munn insisted he wasn’t benefiting from the loan, as he wasn’t charging much interest on it.
Hodgin testified that he had changed his mind, realizing the money should be put toward the property in Taymouth, without informing Munn.
As for the old foundation, the realtor said as far as he was concerned, the home was brand new because 90 per cent of the structure had been completely replaced, including the walls, windows and roof. That meets the same requirements under federal guidelines for charging the HST. If an old foundation is used, it’s still considered a new build.
And Munn pointed out that according to the New Brunswick Real Estate Association’s own data input sheets, there’s no category for such a building, only new or renovated.
As for the garage, the realtor described it as a dream garage for its big size and the fact that it was newly insulated.
“I would have liked to have that garage myself,” Munn said, arguing there was nothing wrong with an older, renovated garage that wasn’t brand new.
His defence lawyer, Paul Elliott, saved his harshest questions for Rebecca Steeves, the matriarch of the mother-daughter team, who as recently as 2024 was part of Re/Max’s Titan Club for top sales, several times being among the top 10 agents in Atlantic Canada.
In her written complaint, Steeves had characterized Munn as “combative” when asked to do the right thing and declare his personal interest in the property.
But Elliott re-read the text messages exchanged between Munn and her daughter, which were polite and professional.
“What is combative in those messages?” Elliott asked. “The evidence suggests he was not combative.”
Steeves replied that she believed that the combative response was verbal, though she couldn’t recount any specific conversations the two had had.
Elliott then became more assertive. “Is it possible this is a personal issue?” the lawyer asked. “Is it possible you’ve been talking about this complaint in the public?”
Steeves and her daughter left Munn’s agency last year and are now with Re/ Max Hartford Realty in Woodstock, even though their property listings are mostly in the Fredericton region. Steeves acknowledged the move had hurt their business financially.
The lawyer then asked if it was true that Steeves had recently approached another top broker and real estate agent, Sharon Corcoran of Truro, at an association meeting in Halifax, to denounce Munn.
“Did you say that he was in a whole heap of trouble and that he was going to go down?” Steeves replied that it was indeed a personal issue for her.
“As a realtor who cares about her clients and the regulations,” she said, adding what Munn had done was “not a good thing.”
The panel will hear from an expert witness called by the defence and closing arguments on June 22.
By John Chilibeck, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Original Published on May 28, 2026 at 08:06
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