Best Practices for Verifying Showing Requests and Securing Property Access
Real estate professionals across the market are being targeted by individuals impersonating licensed agents to gain access to homes. These requests arrive by phone, text, and email, and the people making them often have a real license number, a real agent name, and a believable story. Public license records make that information available to anyone, which means the details a caller can recite no longer prove who they are.
Verification cannot rest on what a requester knows. It must rest on a channel the requester cannot control: the showing system, or contact information the listing agent sources independently. The process below follows that principle and adds almost no friction for a legitimate agent.
The Verification Process
Work the three steps in order. Stop at the first one that applies.
Use the SentriLock showing service to communicate and grant access. Identity is authenticated by the system.
Look the agent up in the MLS. Send showing instructions only to the phone or email listed in the MLS record. Never use contact information the requester supplied.
Look up the company in LARA, call the brokerage office, and confirm the agent’s contact information through the office before sending instructions.
If a requester cannot be confirmed through any of the three steps, do not grant access. A refusal to be verified is the answer.
Warning Signs
Because public data verification fails, the reliable signals are behavioral. Treat the presence of any of these as a reason to slow down and verify.
- Pressure or urgency to gain access quickly.
- Reluctance to use the showing system, or a request for a manual code.
- A request to receive the code by text or email.
- A contact number that does not match the roster.
- A request for access outside normal hours.
- A story that shifts or does not hold up on the callback.
Never Do This
- Verify a requester using license data alone.
- Send showing instructions to a phone number or email the requester supplied. Use only the contact found in the MLS or confirmed through the brokerage office.
- Grant access to anyone you could not confirm through one of the three steps.
Hardening the Listing
- Confirm with the seller that no unscheduled access is authorized.
- Default both occupied and vacant listings to appointment-required.
- Require SentriLock boxes over combination lockboxes. SentriLock authenticates every entry and logs who accessed the property and when, for both the agent and the seller. A combination box offers none of that: convenient, but unauthenticated and unrecorded, so anyone with the code can enter unverified.
Questions on showing security or SentriLock administration may be directed to the GLAR MLS team.
