By Troy Gillard

added peace of mind

Alberta realtors applaud important safety tool with new app

Jul 23, 2019 | 3:04 PM

Realtors in Alberta now have free access to an emergency response app to help keep them safe when they’re working alone.

The move comes after a female agent was sexually assaulted by a man at an open house in Calgary last month.

The Alberta Real Estate Association, which has over 10,500 members, is including a subscription to the “LifeLine Response” app at no additional cost to its membership dues.

The app allows realtors to alert their personal support network or summon emergency responders to their GPS location. Users can also view threat notifications in their area.

“Realtors love helping their clients with the largest and most important purchases of their lives, but the job requires us to sometimes work alone in unfamiliar locations and with relative strangers,” association chairwoman Jennifer Gilbert said Tuesday. “The LifeLine Response app is an important tool in improving Realtor safety.”

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Realtors in central Alberta are also pleased to have the app available.

“We think it’s an exceptionally good idea and it’s really going to help our agents, especially our female agents, but everybody,” says Richard Pochylko, president of the Central Alberta Realtors’ Association. “From our perspective, anything that we can do to help make safety more available and easy to use for our members, we’re a hundred per cent behind it. We think this is an awesome thing for us.”

Pochylko says safety in the real estate industry has become more of a priority over the past decade.

“We pay attention to it. I know at our brokerage, and at others, we have safety measures in place and we share information with each other,” he explains.

“If someone at another brokerage was accosted or felt insecure, that information gets shared. It’s not something that we keep secret. We do work together that way so this makes it a heck of a lot easier to communicate to every single member, and I think that’s fantastic.”

Pochylko says the last incident involving a local realtor happened about a decade ago, but adds the app will still help provide some valuable peace of mind.

“It’s a sad statement on society that people are like that. But there are predators out there and we can be put into some strange situations. So having something like this is great.”

(With file from The Canadian Press)