Headlines have been buzzing this past month with the robbery and ransack of an innocent homeowner's house due to an Airbnb visit gone terribly wrong.
For those of you unfamiliar with the story, a San Francisco event planner, EJ, rented her house for a week on Airbnb. When EJ returned to her property after her 'guests' left, she was faced with a house that had been ransacked from the inside out, and all of her valuable possessions had been stolen. What followed was a PR disaster for Airbnb, and a yet-to-be-resolved case for EJ.
Airbnb is a website that enables people who have extra space in their homes to rent it out to travelers, as a viable alternative to hotels.
We have surely become a more trusting nation, as we have seen websites such as CouchSurfing or Airbnb, that allow complete strangers to stay at our homes, rise to fame quicker than imaginable! As good as it is to live in a trusting environment, there will always be a few rotten apples that ruin the experience for us all.
As “out there” as many of us may see trusting a complete stranger to come live in our homes. The case is not that far off from what we do on a daily basis as real estate professionals!
We meet complete strangers, sometimes without doing a back-ground check, and take them to view properties all by ourselves. We might not risk property damage to our own homes, but we surely risk our personal safety, as it seems attacks against real estate agents creep up on the headlines every week.
Prior to the attack against EJ, Airbnb had never implemented a safety screening system, where hosts could check to see whether guests were who they said they were. This case might have been avoided had EJ’s guests’ identity had been verified, and they would have known they would be held accountable for the ransacking. The same applies for real estate!
Asking potential clients to verify their ID by photocopying their drivers license, not only allows us to verify their identity, but it also signals to them that we are on the look-out for our personal safety and that they will be held accountable for any attack against us or the properties we are showing.
Never forget that no sale is worth risking your safety, even if that means losing a potential client because he or she does not want to take the extra steps to ensure you are safe.
Take care and be safe everyone!
The Moby Team
Following the apparent increase in attack against real estate agents, we are working to get to the bottom of why attacks have been on the rise. Please take a moment to fill out our quick survey bellow, and we will be sharing the results with our fellow ActiveRainers in the coming weeks.
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