Every showing, every time: Making FOREWARN part of the team
Welcome to Safe & Sold™, the series dedicated to agent safety, presented by FOREWARN®.
Our guest today is Anna Paduhovich, who leads the #1 Keller Williams team in Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Norfolk, Suffolk and Portsmouth. She brings more than 17 years of experience and a strong reputation in both her community and the industry. In 2022, her family-run team that includes her husband, daughter, and best friend helped 225 families transition to the next stage of their lives, and that number continues to grow each year. Anna has been recognized as one of the top agents in the city by the Hampton Roads Realtors® Association, including being ranked #17 of over 9,000 agents in 2022, and as Keller Williams’ top 100 producers world-wide.
“We use FOREWARN every single day”
Anna integrated FOREWARN into her showing process more than four years ago and has been using it every day since to help keep herself and her team safe. Along with consistent communication with her FOREWARN account manager, she has found the tool to be an invaluable resource in her business.
A proactive approach
Before FOREWARN, Anna used phone location sharing as her primary safety measure when meeting new clients. Unfortunately, location sharing fell short when a meeting for a new listing went longer than anticipated and her husband was unable to reach her. The reactive nature of location sharing lead to a police officer becoming the unofficial first showing, as they arrived at the home to confirm she was indeed safe.
That event led Anna to seek out a solution like FOREWARN, to provide a proactive safety approach that would compliment and enhance her team’s safety protocols.
Peace of mind in uncertain times
She says that it’s not necessarily possible to ask each person if they have committed a crime in the past, nor would she expect a truthful answer from someone who had ill intentions. When considering the potential for today’s agents to experience fraud or threats to their personal safety, Anna looks to a holistic safety process she has implemented within her team to ensure the potential client is who they say they are.
This includes working in teams for open houses, using FOREWARN with every potential buyer, and not being afraid to take further steps to protect herself when something doesn’t seem “right.” This unwillingness to put herself in harm’s way has led to a culture of prioritized personal safety within Anna’s team. This is critical, as Anna and her team receive at least one phone call a month from a perspective client who is either not who they say they are, or does not have the assets they say they have.
The evolution of safety
Looking back on her career, Anna feels more safe today than when she first began in the industry—the agents in her office had initially carried pink stun guns with them to open houses with varying degrees of success. While fraud and threats to safety are still prevalent today, the resources and tools available to her have evolved. Along with a hefty amount of due diligence, tools like FOREWARN are what Anna says are making the difference between then and now.
Every showing, every time
Anna’s #1 piece of advice to agents: Everybody that you meet with, FOREWARN them. 100% of the time.
She stresses how important it is to confirm you know who you are meeting with, and that they aren’t meeting with you for nefarious reasons. Even masked numbers that won’t show in FOREWARN can indicate a potential red flag and a sign to perform further investigation into verifying the person’s identity.
Thank you again to Anna for speaking with us. Stay tuned for the next episode of Safe & Sold, presented by FOREWARN!