September is REALTOR® Safety Month

A month designated to helping members understand the risks they face through knowledge, awareness and empowerment

It is imperative for all REALTORS® to have personal safety protocols in place that can be used every day with each interaction, such as meeting new clients, showing properties and sharing information online.

The Long Island Board of REALTORS® (LIBOR) has made available an assortment of tools focused on agent safety that brokers and agents can use to establish a strategy that can also be incorporated into current office safety protocol.

Available to all LIBOR members as a free member benefit, is the Real Safe Agent program. Real Safe Agent is more than a personal safety app; it is a crime prevention system built specifically for the real estate industry. Based on behavioral science, the system empowers our real estate community to cooperate and collaborate for the purposes of keeping each other safe. We implore all members to take advantage of this free benefit. The more members using the system, the safer everyone becomes.

In 2019, LIBOR established a REALTOR® Safety Alert Network to notify members of local safety concerns and emergencies. Through this system, LIBOR’s CEO, Legal Counsel and/or President will determine which parties should be notified and the appropriate communication channels for the alert. The procedure then follows suit with the National Association of REALTORS®’ (NAR) alert system which deploys REALTOR® Safety Alerts via social media when a physical or cyber threat to REALTORS® warrants national attention.

Alerts will be issued in situations when a REALTOR® or a REALTOR®’s immediate family member goes missing, an association name is being used fraudulently to dupe consumers, or a physical threat to REALTORS® is deemed to warrant national attention.

The goal of these programs, aside from keeping practitioners informed of threats in their area, is to educate members about common dangers in the field, empower them with precautions and preparations so that they can avoid risky situations, create awareness of members’ surroundings and to identify the dangers that REALTORS® face every day.

Further information on these tools and additional resources are available at www.LIRealtor.com/safety.