REALTOR® Safety Month—observed every September—is a month-long campaign aimed at helping real estate professionals stay safe as they navigate situations on a daily basis that could ultimately put their safety at risk—from meeting prospective clients to showing properties in secluded or unfamiliar areas.
Underscoring the importance of keeping the conversation front and center year-round, the National Association of REALTORS®’ (NAR) 2024 Member Safety Residential Report noted that over the past 12 months, 34% of real estate professionals reported feeling unsafe during an open house. Drilling down further, 31% feared for their personal safety after receiving a threatening or inappropriate email/text/phone call/voicemail. Thirty-one percent of residential members also reported feeling unsafe during a showing.
But with commission settlement training taking precedence in today’s post-lawsuit environment, according to Tracey ‘the Safety Lady’ Hawkins, safety training is being pushed to the backburner.
Advocating for proactive safety measures
As Founder and CEO of Safety and Security Source, Hawkins advocates for proactive safety measures—integrating safety training with business-building strategies to make it more appealing and actionable for agents.
“This is where I’m targeting those who are saying that the commission settlement training is a priority. I’m saying you can do that and you can do safety training,” says Hawkins. “It’s business building and safe practices.”
To that end, Hawkins teaches agents how to work in a safe manner while tying commission settlement best practices into the conversation.
“Agents are now tasked with trying to get buyers to come in and sign the buyer agreement, where many times before they never had to do that—and that’s a safety practice,” explains Hawkins. “Now you get them in-person, and you get to increase witness potential, so they’re less likely to do something to you.”
From there, Hawkins stresses the importance of having a safety consultation with the buyer to discuss how to maneuver the real estate process in a safe manner.
“This is where the conversation about wire fraud is going to occur, where they’re going to warn the buyer that there are cybercriminals who will try to scam them,” explains Hawkins. “This is where the agent is telling the buyer not to click on any links in an email because cybercriminals are using the tools to write phishing emails, and they’re enclosing a link.”
The conversation is just as important on the seller side when conducting a listing appointment, where, according to Hawkins, agents should be instructing sellers as to how to keep their homes secure by getting jewelry out of jewelry boxes, medicine out of medicine cabinets and bank statements, personal documents and mail out of sight.
“My goal is to teach agents that you can add business building to your safety training so that you can make it home every night while at the same time protecting the consumer,” says Hawkins, who points to generative AI as the biggest push on the safety front right now.
“The real estate industry doesn’t know to fear this, so my goal is to educate that this is happening,” says Hawkins—referencing a recent deepfake AI incident coming out of Florida.
“I’m showing images of the deepfake properties, the deepfake people, and I’m talking about the existence of these kinds of crimes—and they have no idea. That scares me, but it also motivates me to raise the red flag,” says Hawkins. “When I talk to agents about being alert and aware, they need to know that this kind of crime is happening.”
Determined to reach as many real estate agents as possible, Hawkins’ overall message boils down to the fact that education is key.
“Get expert safety training,” says Hawkins. “Every new-agent training should include safety, and every agent should get safety training at least once a year.”
Raising safety education and awareness
Carl Carter Jr.—a REALTOR® and founder of the Beverly Carter Foundation (a 501c3 nonprofit dedicated to providing real estate agents with information and tools to enable them to return home safely at the end of each day)—has spent the past 10 years advocating for safety in the real estate space.
“Throughout my experience as a safety advocate, I’ve experienced the same heartbreaking response from so many agents across the world: ‘I was just doing my job…and then the unthinkable happened.’”
Carter’s mother, Beverly Carter, was kidnapped and murdered by a pair of clients on Sept. 25, 2014—and since his mother’s passing, Carter has dedicated himself to spreading the message of safety by providing research, information, consulting, training and support to every level of the real estate industry.
“Her murder forever changed our family, and the outreach of agents across the world put a fire in my belly to do everything I can to help raise safety education and awareness,” he says.
“As agents would contact me offering kind words of encouragement and condolences, they would also share their own personal stories of victimization while working,” continues Carter, explaining that he ultimately hit a crossroads, feeling that he must either do more or step away from the message completely.
“Grieving the loss of my best friend and the knowledge of so much victimization drove my passion to do everything within my power to eliminate the victimization that occurs within our industry,” he adds.
Encouraged by the fact that NAR’s 2024 Member Safety Residential Report identified that 73% of agents have personal safety protocols in place that they use with every client (up from 71% in 2023), Carter notes that the most important thing he’s learned along his journey to promote REALTOR® safety is to keep himself accountable to thinking about safety as often as possible.
“There’s no one-size-fits-all approach, but I firmly believe it’s possible to mitigate many of the inherent risks associated with working alone in our great industry.”
While Carter admits that the starting point for any safety analysis he conducts within the real estate industry is what could have saved his mom’s life, he goes on to explain that there have been great strides made over the past 10 years when it comes to phone carriers legitimizing callers and hopefully reducing the occurrence of deceptive strategies through telephone.
“Where this assistance falls short, the industry has overwhelmingly embraced the smartphone app FOREWARN,” says Carter. “As identified through their website, ‘using as little as an incoming phone number, FOREWARN can positively identify over 80% of prospects.’”
Further, he notes that SentriLock has invested heavily in the expansion of their app’s safety functions, explaining that “their team has been an avid supporter of agent safety and our mission since the very beginning.”
“Learning how technology can shore-up my personal safety protocol shortcomings has been liberating. Even when I forget to update my circle on my plans, they can always track my location and my calendar without having to contact me directly,” concludes Carter. “We pay a small fortune for the phones we use all day; enabling their safety features costs nothing additional but can provide many layers of safety and security. It takes little effort and communication with your circle to set it up, but it’s so worth it.”
