The overwhelming majority of real estate agents are women — and they are vulnerable to abuse in an industry that offers few protections, demands that they meet clients alone in empty homes and encourages them to use their appearance to bring in buyers.
Dawna Hetzler, a Realtor who learned to use a gun after fearing the dangers of her job, at a listed property in Elizabeth, Colo., May 1, 2023.
Across the nation, the overwhelming majority of real estate agents are women — and they are vulnerable to abuse in an industry that offers few protections, demands that they meet clients alone in empty homes and encourages them to use their appearance to help bring in buyers. Reports of harassment and occasionally physical violence, including rape and even murder, highlight the risks they face.
“That world is pretty much the wild, wild west,” said Kimberly Perlin, a complex trauma therapist in Towson, Maryland, who has treated several real estate agents who were sexually assaulted at work. “Anybody can call up and say they have money and want a house, including sexual predators. And in a house, you have an unattended space, and an inherent power balance, because the salesperson wants the sale and the buyer knows it.
Agents say the solution requires industrywide buy-in, and some recommended universal background checks for buyers and making mandatory safety trainings a contingency for all brokerages’ memberships in trade organizations. Others suggested that female agents have an option to ask for an escort when client meetings feel unsafe, with their brokerages covering the cost.
Surveys by industry groups have found that harassment in the industry is commonplace, with most real estate agents reporting that they had either personally experienced or witnessed sexual harassment in the workplace. “Keller Williams’ policies and guidelines encourage employees and agents who believe they have been harassed in the workplace to promptly report those facts to their franchisee’s management,” said Darryl Frost, a spokesperson for Keller Williams, who added that management is also required to investigate. But while DiSalvo has always felt that she receives a sensitive ear, little action follows.
Yet the very nature of their jobs — often meeting strangers to woo them into buying property — exposes real estate agents to danger. Those in the industry are well aware of high profile murders: One agent was killed showing a million-dollar home in 2008 in British Columbia; another was gunned down outside a property she was showing in Florida last year. In 2021 alone, 25 real estate professionals died from violence on the job, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Too much onus is on individual agents to create their own safety measures, Carl Carter said, when what is needed is industrywide reform. Rather than put protocols in place that would protect agents in the field, brokerages have been slow to respond to calls for broader reform — or resistant all together, he said.
“A few percentage points out of 1.5 million suddenly becomes a really different conversation when you realize it means thousands of people have been victimized,” he said.
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