After an enforced sabbatical, real estate queen Marnie Adams is back on the job.

Ms Adams, who lost her real estate licence in March after pleading guilty to misconduct charges, has resumed her post at Sotheby’s in Parnell – the week after her suspension ended.

But after alerting NBR ONLINE she was back in business and ready to talk, the Irish woman who still maintains she did no wrong skipped out of interview appointments.

She doesn’t trust the press not to refer to her suspension, and believes all references to that episode should be expunged from Google.

Holidaying overseas

It seems Ms Adams – kitted out in black fitted dress, lace bodice and high-heels when she and her accessory pooch Tuppence met NBR ONLINE – is not back at work because she needs the money.

Far from it, she says. She has been holidaying at her Brisbane property and “elsewhere overseas”.

Once New Zealand’s top-selling female estate agent, she was rumoured by colleagues to be a millionaire in her own right from years earning handsome commissions on premium top-end property sales.

In happier times her former employer Bayleys trumpeted how she had carved a “phenomenal career” in real estate over six years with more than half a billion dollars of sales from Parnell to Glendowie.

Her clients included a star-studded array of NBR Rich Listers, for whom she handled the sale and purchase of some New Zealand’s most expensive and exclusive homes.

Her Queen’s counsel John Billington claimed at her disciplinary hearing she had been forced to sell her house, live in rented accommodation and had sufered huge personal distress and anxiety.

Doesn't need the money

But she’s not in it for the money, she insists. “It’s my love of the work and desire to prove I’m not going away,” Ms Adams says.

It is because she wants to show the people who “saw her off” they can’t run her out of town.

Top of that list is Bayley’s boss Mike Bayley, who Ms Adams squarely blames for the complaint which got her suspended.

She had the golden Midas sales touch at Bayleys for years.  

What went wrong

Bayleys complained to the Real Estate Institute’s disciplinary tribunal that she acquired an interest in a Mission Bay property she listed without obtaining the consent of her vendor clients or informing them of her interest in the property.

Her licence was suspended for six months from March 14, she was fined $10,000 and ordered to pay $5000 costs.

She has her own, exceptionally forthright, opinions about why the disciplinary complaint  was made in the first place.

It was, she believes, the real estate equivalent of a “spurned lover’s deeds”.

Demanding unacceptable editorial control over this story, Ms Adams stops talking, reiterating her belief the press can’t be trusted.

What the ads say about her

Instead, her re-entry into a field in which she earned the name "million-dollar Marnie" is featured in real estate advertising and on the Sotheby’s website.

The agency hails her return “after a holiday abroad” in the Property Press, in which it offers a one-page advertising profile.

“Marnie is once again offering buyers and vendors her proven approach to the marketing and sale of unique homes in the premium property sector,” the advertisement reads.

The expensive glossy ad invites prospective clients to “discuss your individual requirements with Marnie today.”

Similar promotions are being run in other publications, including those who regaled readers with her fall from grace.

She already has some listings – her first goes to auction next Wednesday.

There are three more properties listed in her name on the Sotheby’s site, all of them high-end addresses.