Welcome to Safe Realty Podcast with me, Shannon Cutler.
I am on a mission to educate my listeners so they don't become the next true crime headline.
As a former police officer with over 18 years of investigative experience and now a real estate agent, I educate realtors on how to handle their own security in vulnerable situations.
If you enjoy learning tools to improve your safety, I'm going to ask you to please follow this podcast and leave a review.
Let's think of this show as True Crime Prevention.
Welcome to episode one of Safe Realty.
It's a new year, a new podcast.
And I want to share a little bit about why I started this podcast and what I'm hoping that you will all get from it. So really, really glad you're here. And thank you so much for taking your safety seriously.
So, I was in the RCMP, Canadian Federal Police Officer for nearly 18 years. I had worked in all sorts of places around British Columbia and Canada. I worked in a place that was a little more northern.
I wouldn't say it was a remote community, but it was a place where I worked alone a lot.
And I had to learn very quickly that all 150 pounds, 5'8 of me was not going to be able to outfight and run faster than all the bad guys or all the situations I needed to deal with.
And I learned very quickly I needed to use my brains over my brawn.
And that definitely was something, a theme that I took with me throughout my career, that I would think of ways to get out of a situation or to get help or to figure out a plan or to get people to get in the back of the police car when I was all alone in the middle of a forest or dealing with wild drunk rednecks in a snowmobile pit party, whatever it was, it wasn't going to be me wrestling them out of there.That was going to work. So I had to be creative and just learn to use my common sense. And so I left real estate. I left policing and joined real estate seven years ago. And soon after I got into real estate, a couple of ladies in my office, they both were physically similar looking in their body shape, their hair, their facial features. They had expressed to me that this one man had been coming to their open houses.
And I wouldn't say it's stalking because in my mind, having investigated many stalking incidents, this wasn't one of those cases. It was serious, but it wasn't, I didn't feel it was a high risk, but it could have gone there.
And so we talked a little bit about it. This fellow had been coming to their open houses very, very regularly.
He would show up at the end of the open house. He would refuse to take off his shoes.
He would watch them. He would...all the creeper red flags are popping up. He wouldn't ask questions about real estate. He just seemed to be nervous and awkward. Like six red flags mentioned right there.
They didn't ask this man to leave not once. A couple of times they did say, okay, I'm closing up for the night or closing up for the day. You're going to have to, you know, leave with me. He didn't seem too interested in listening to them. So they didn't know how to handle this.
And it surprised the hell out of me because after having policed for so long, I didn't, I mean, I was in situations that were high risk, but I never felt really vulnerable. You know, whereas in real estate, I thought immediately, this is a very, very odd profession. We are going to isolated locations by ourselves with complete strangers and no one knows where we're going. We don't know these people. We don't know anything about them. And most of the time, it's just people looking for a house and they need to find a Realtor, and you are a stranger to them. But there are occasions, and I have encountered so many of them, where these strangers either commit a crime against the Realtor or have intentions of doing so.
So with these gals in my office, we started talking about things that they could do at their open house to keep them safe. We will get into a whole open house safety month eventually on this podcast.
But this specific incident is really what got me thinking about Realtor safety and that these women who were both one very experienced Realtor and the other one was just coming into real estate, but she had been a probation officer. So she had dealt with, you know, high-risk offenders and having to communicate and having to deal with situations for many years. So it really surprised me that they didn't know how to handle this, and how did I get this fellow out of their open house? So we called the police, reported it to figure out who this guy was and address him, and they did their thing, the police did their thing, and I worked with these ladies in how to keep themselves safe for open houses. But that just got me thinking, and so I brought it up to my company, my own brokerage in Vancouver, and how can we start talking about real estate safety? So we started talking more about it, and I developed a one-hour subject matter expert, where I talked to my company. The day after my talk, a young female agent called me and said to me that, that morning, she had gotten a call from a fellow to list his house, and she had just taken my one-hour seminar the day before, and so she got to thinking she's going to take a few minutes, and figure out who this guy is before she meets with him. So she did a little research, and she found out that this fellow was on parole for murdering his ex-girlfriend. And she said, what do I do? And I said, well, it's really great you know this information, because this could go a few ways. This fellow picked you, a young attractive female agent, out of the 2,000 agents, or however many agents are in Vancouver, and he could have picked a 6-year-old man with 25 years experience, but he picked you. It may not mean he wants to murder you or do anything nefarious to you. Maybe you're good at your job, maybe you have a friendly face. But at the very least now, you have the information you need to make an informed decision as to where you want to take this.
Do you want to take his business?
Do you want to pass on to somebody else?
Say no thank you, bring him into the office.
All the things that we could do to make you safe, or just say pass on the business and pass him on to somebody else. But these two incidents that occurred very quickly as I got to real estate, solidified in my brain that we need to talk about this. We're not even going to get into the homicides, countless homicides of real estate agents in North America and likely around the world. I don't mean that this happens on the regular, but it happens enough for people to talk about this and to learn a few best practices to implement into their business every day. And that's what this podcast is. We're going to just talk about all the things that go along with Realtor Safety. Even it'll discover your personal safety in a lot of ways as well.
And I hope that you stick around week after week as we dive really deep into some of these topics, get really cool experts from the field and hear from other agents, their stories of what they've gone through, maybe families of victims of some of these awful tragedies, too, and what they've gone through and how we can avoid these things and help make us safer.
You know, I am in a bit of a unique position having been a police officer and now a Realtor.
I've been in both these phases. I've developed these safety plans with people and feel that I can help you and we can help each other and learn from each other in finding ways to keep us safe. You know, yeah, it is a bit interesting, this whole topic of it. Even yesterday, I was off to speak.
So our Real Estate Board has a member orientation. Every three months, the new agents on the board have to sit down to this whole day of this is the system, this is the fee, this is what you can and can't do, these are the rules. And maybe a year, year and a half ago, they said, well, why don't you come and do 20 or 30 minutes on Realtor Safety and on this course that I developed with the Real Estate Board?
So that's another thing, an accredited course I developed. So that's a great idea. Get these brand new agents, especially the ones that are brand new, that are just really hungry for business and may make really quick mistakes that could put them at risk.
So I would go in for 15 to 30 minutes. It always was way longer because it's a really, this topic is a conversation generator and people want to talk about it. I would go in and talk about it. And now it's actually mandatory on our real estate board's member orientation. So yesterday, I was heading down from real estate tour, talking to one of this one agent in our community. He's been in the business for, I don't know, like 30 some years at least. And he said to me, is a big man. He said about 20 years ago, a female called him to come out and have a look at her house to see if he could, you know, give her an idea of what it was worth so that he could list the property for her. so he said he went out there. It was a little later in the evening. He didn't like to work in the evening, but this is a good business to have. And he got out there, got to the door, and she came to the door in what could be described as not clothing that you would expect for a business, a professional meeting. And he said it was very clear immediately why she had asked him to come there and it wasn't for business. It was for a sexual purpose. And he stopped and was like, oh shit, and he got in his car and he got out of there. He said it was very clear she came to the door, that what was what was going to happen, or what she, what her intentions were. She got in the car, got out of there.
She's calling him, oh, why are you coming back? I thought you were coming over to do this. And he's like, no, I'm sorry. I'm not going to be able to list your property. I'm going to send another agent out there to work with you. Just can't, don't have time in my business right now. And it was very unsatisfactory to her response. I actually don't think she, he said, I don't think that she ended up selling her property because she had no intention of it.
This happened.
This is another story for another episode, but it even has happened to myself on a mortgage broker friend where an older fellow just listed his property and wanted to get a mortgage to buy a new place just because he was lonely and wanted to spend time with two lovely ladies that were both at least 30 years younger than him, regardless of his age. Regardless of the age, it doesn't matter. His intentions were crappy. They were not for the purpose of business. It was loneliness and sexuality, which is not okay when you have these nefarious purposes for doing this. But all that being said, this is why I am talking about Realtor safety I have every single time I talk, I've taught hundreds and hundreds of agents in the past six months since this murder of a Realtor in Ontario. I've probably talked to 500 agents around the province, a couple places in other provinces, Ontario, Manitoba, because it is unfortunate when tragedy strikes that people feel that, okay, this is when we have to talk about it.And it's not that.
But I'm going to jump on this. When people want to hear about it, let's talk about it. And I think that anybody could get something out of this podcast, whether we learn a tip or trick for our own personal safety, whether we learn it because of things that we could use on dating websites or Facebook Marketplace, or teaching our kids that are going off to universities, some personal safety things.
There's going to be something in this for everyone, but it is going to be focused on, in some ways, in the business of real estate. I have some cool experts lined up. I can't wait for us to go through all of this together. But now you know why I'm here.
You know why I have the experience to talk about this topic.
I'm extremely passionate about it.
I want everybody to share this.
I want everybody to talk about it.
Just even one or two things that you hear about, or this topic, that will help keep someone that you know, or yourself, a little bit safer.
So if you have a story or a tip to share, please reach out to me via email or social media.
Your experience could help someone else, and it might even be featured on an upcoming episode.
I would love to hear from you.
If you've learned anything in today's episodes, recommend or send this to a friend.
Be safe, be real safe.