Agent Safety Month with Carl Carter

In September 2014, real estate agent Beverly Carter was abducted during a house showing and murdered by a couple posing as interested homebuyers. Her son Carl Carter, an agent with RE/MAX Elite in Little Rock, Arkansas, has since made it his life’s work to advocate for agent safety.

Carter founded a nonprofit organization – the Beverly Carter Foundation – that raises awareness, teaches classes and delivers resources on how real estate agents can protect themselves from potentially dangerous situations while working alone.

On this week’s episode of Start With a Win, Carter joins RE/MAX CEO Adam Contos to share how the untimely loss of his mother led to his realization that there needed to be better education and protocols in place to keep agents, brokers and clients safe.

“I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard people say, ‘I thought of Beverly’ and they made a different decision in their business that could save their lives,” Carter shares. “Everything we do with the nonprofit is to educate [and] empower agents to make preventive business practices to keep them from finding themselves like my sweet mama did on the second floor of a vacant home with a taser in her side. It’s all about helping keep agents from those scenarios.”

In the podcast, Carter stresses that one protocol agents and brokers can implement is a fair – and rigorous – screening process before showing a house to a client. He believes that checking someone’s background and identification is a simple way to determine their true intentions as a potential client.

“My mom had no idea when she was going to that property that day that this couple was not from out of state. She had no idea that this husband was not a fine, upstanding citizen – but he was [actually] a seven-time felon that intended to hold her for ransom,” he says.

Tune in to this week’s episode to hear about the journey Carter took to establish the Beverly Carter Foundation and the many lives he’s touched along the way through outreach, speaking occasions and the annual RE/MAX R4 convention.