Watson Realty isn’t waiting for something to go wrong to protect its real estate agents during vulnerable times like showings.
The Florida-based brokerage is rolling out Bond, a personal-security platform, to roughly 800 agents and 200 corporate employees across its real estate, property management, insurance and title businesses in Florida and Georgia. And the brokerage, not the agent, is picking up the tab.
The deployment landed during Realtor Safety Month in September, and it follows Inman’s roundup of safety resources agents are using now, which included Bond among eight tools.
The distinction Bond and Watson want made clear: this isn’t a building-security system retrofitted for real estate. It’s personal security that travels with the agent’s phone, independent of any office, badge or camera.
What Bond actually does
Doron Kempel, Bond’s co-founder, says existing agent safety tools can’t close the gap between “too early to call 911” and “too late.”
An agent walking to her car after a showing, or entering a listing appointment alone, isn’t in legal emergency. She just doesn’t feel safe. Traditional options, Kempel argues, activate only after something has already happened.
Doron Kempel
Bond’s app gives agents a menu of features instead of a single panic button. “Track Me” flags an artificial intelligence-monitored route deviation or unexplained stop.
“Radian Agent” lets a live security professional stay connected by video, or the agent keeps a finger on the screen for the duration of a showing. And “Security Check” is a scheduled check-in tool suited to something like an open house.
Kempel gives the scenario of an agent uneasy while entering the house, so she clicks “video monitoring.” The agent connects with a Bond security professional over the phone and gets a witness on video.
“That alone is a deterrent. Why would someone hurt her in front of a witness?” Kempel told Inman. “If the person doesn’t leave her alone, the Bond security agent tells her to turn the phone toward them and announces it’s a recorded call and police are on the way.”
Privacy is also central to the app. Kempel said Bond doesn’t report individual usage back to the employer that’s paying for the service. Only aggregate, anonymized data is reported, if requested.
Why now, according to Watson
For Bill Watson III, president of Watson Realty, the decision wasn’t tied to a specific incident.
He said the decision to partner with Bond now is shaped more by what he sees happening industry-wide than by anything internal. He cited news of the brutal murder of two Georgia real estate agents in 2003 as part of what keeps agent safety “constantly” on his mind.
Stacy Humphreys, 53, was convicted of malice murder in the deaths of Cyndi Williams, 33, and Lori Brown, 21. Around midday on Nov. 3, 2003, he walked into the sales office staffed by the two agents at a model home in a new subdivision in Powder Springs, about 20 miles northwest of Atlanta. Evidence at trial showed he forced the women to strip naked and give him their bank PINs before shooting them both.
“I don’t want my agents making a ‘less than $20 a month’ mistake with their safety,” Watson told Inman. “So I built Bond in as a standard feature across my team.”
Watson, a family-owned brokerage that says it was once the largest in its market before Compass and other consolidation pushed it to third, already used Forewarn to vet phone numbers before meetings and had ID-check protocols in place.
Bill Watson III
Those tools address who a client is before an appointment. Bond will be used as coverage during the appointment itself.
It’s relevant, Watson said, given how much of his workforce now operates out of small, largely unstaffed “efficiency centers” rather than fully staffed branch offices. It’s a shift that stuck after pandemic-era remote work became the norm.
Watson also pointed to a detail worth noting for other brokers weighing similar tools.
Roughly 60 percent to 65 percent of Realtors are women, according to the National Association of Realtors. That demographic split shapes how Watson thinks about physical vulnerability during showings with unknown buyers.
A tier above panic buttons
Bond’s broader customer base skews toward corporate and enterprise clients. Kempel named retail, media, telecom and financial-services clients among the company’s largest accounts.
Watson Realty is, according to Kempel, the first major brokerage to deploy the platform across its full workforce rather than through individual agents buying it on their own.
That framing matters for how Bond is positioning itself in real estate specifically: not as a new category competing against tracking apps and panic buttons, but as a tier above them.
Watson framed the investment as risk mitigation but also for retention and recruiting.
“My job is to get my people out doing more work and making more money themselves,” he said. “If this makes them feel more comfortable being out there and being proactive, that’s a win.”
