Real estate professionals can feel vulnerable when working alone at open houses or touring vacant homes with clients they barely know. In fact, 22% of residential agents say they’ve experienced a situation that made them fear for their personal safety or the security of their personal information, according to the 2024 REALTORS® and Member Safety Residential Report.
To address such concerns, proptech companies are increasingly developing tools designed to enhance agent safety—offering features that allow professionals to quickly and discreetly call for help when they feel at risk.
NAR REALTOR® News recently spoke with Vanessa Martin, a U.S. army combat veteran and co-founder of Tether RE, about how she and her husband, Scott Martin, built a tool aimed at keeping agents connected and safe in the field. Part of the 2025 REACH cohort from the National Association of REALTORS®’ Second Century Ventures, Tether RE is expanding partnerships with REALTOR® associations nationwide. Learn more about this mobile safety app, which also has a wearable version coming soon.
What specific safety gaps in real estate transactions led you and Scott to build Tether RE?
MARTIN: We saw a critical gap between prevention and protection. Most of the safety tools available to agents focused on pre-screening or vetting clients before a meeting. Agents are most vulnerable at showings, open houses or when meeting someone new in a vacant property, so filling this gap was essential.
Scott and I kept coming back to the same question: What happens in the moment when something goes wrong? If an agent cannot speak, if their phone is taken or if they lose consciousness, existing safety tools simply were not built to respond to that reality.
This led us to build Tether RE. It’s an active safety system designed to protect agents wherever they go, whether they are working or on personal time. In an emergency, time matters, and our ability to dispatch help to agents quickly is a life-saving tool.
Can you walk us through a hypothetical situation where Tether RE would activate to protect an agent during a showing or open house?
MARTIN: Imagine an agent receives a text from someone they do not know asking to see a property. Instead of immediately agreeing, they use Tether RE to run a pre-screening check. The system provides identifying information to confirm the person is who they say they are, flags whether they are a registered sex offender and allows the agent to run a criminal background check. The agent also searches the property address to confirm the individual is actually associated with the home. Everything appears legitimate, so the agent schedules the showing.
When the agent arrives, Tether’s “Proximity Safety Timer” automatically activates with a default 45-minute window. Because the agent scheduled the showing in the app, the system knows exactly when they have arrived and starts the countdown without the agent having to do anything manually.
As the showing begins, something feels slightly off. The individual starts asking unusual questions and moving unpredictably through the home. At this moment, the agent has the ability to press their “SOS” button and get on the phone with one of our trained safety monitoring agents. Because this isn’t tying up a 911 dispatch line, the agent can stay on this call for as long as they feel necessary, knowing someone is there “with” them, even if they are just nervous and no real emergency has unfolded.
As the showing continues, the individual becomes aggressive and the agent is suddenly attacked. In the struggle, the agent is overpowered, struck with a weapon and falls to the ground while trying to defend themselves. At that moment, Tether’s “Impact and Struggle Detection” recognizes the sudden impact and an alert is automatically triggered.
Even if the agent is rendered unconscious, the emergency escalation is already in action because the system recognizes they were unable to answer the immediate text or call from Tether’s 24/7 safety monitoring team, which requires entering their safety pin.
At this point, Tether’s 24/7 live emergency response team is engaged. They receive the agent’s precise real-time location, coordinate with local first responders and notify the agent’s pre-set safety contacts of the emergency alert. There is no delay waiting for the agent to speak or explain what is happening. The system acts for them.
There are multiple layers of protection working together at the same time.
With your background as a U.S. Army Combat veteran, what made real estate the right industry to focus your personal safety mission on?
MARTIN: My time in the Army was spent as a combat medic … focused on providing life-saving aid to wounded soldiers and civilians, often in the most high-stakes and chaotic environments imaginable. In combat medicine, we live by the concept of the “golden hour”—the critical 60-minute window of time following a traumatic injury where prompt medical treatment has the highest likelihood of preventing death.
Looking at the safety challenges facing real estate agents today, the parallels are immediate and obvious. Real estate agents are frequently in the field alone, meeting strangers in empty homes and working in isolated environments.
After seeing the growing number of news reports about attacks and accidents in this industry, I realized that the same philosophy we used in the military, to reduce response time to honor that “golden hour,” was missing for real estate professionals.
I chose to focus my personal safety mission on this industry because agents deserve the highest level of commitment to their personal protection. They should not have to gamble their safety to do their jobs.
