The tensions in the rental market are being felt on the ground. Due to a limited supply on the market, more and more real estate agents are confronted with aggressive behavior from prospective tenants. And so real estate agent Dewaele Vastgoed has decided to work on assertiveness training and a self-defense course.
“For every property we can rent to someone, we have to disappoint 33 other people,” says Ann-Sophie Claeys of Dewaele Vastgoed. “So you also have to take into account that many people have often missed out on a property. I can imagine that something like that could matter. Finding a home simply has a major impact on someone’s life.”
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Strikingly enough, real estate agents are therefore more often confronted with aggressive behavior from prospective tenants. Sometimes it goes far. “My son has already been threatened after someone looked up my profile on Facebook. A group of six to seven men have also surrounded and intimidated me in the office,” says Claeys. “As a real estate agent, we must and want to be very accessible to everyone, but that also makes us vulnerable.”
Test phase
And so Dewaele Vastgoed takes the necessary measures. “Because more and more reports are coming from our offices, we have decided to implement assertiveness training and a self-defense course tailored to our employees,” says Sofie Spriet, CEO of Dewaele Vastgoed. “We teach them not only how to verbally defuse a situation, but also how to physically extricate themselves from a problem situation.”
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Since this is a new phenomenon, the course is still in a testing phase. “For the time being, six employees who have been approached aggressively are following the course, together with a number of managers who have many years of experience. This way they can act quickly and appropriately when a problem situation arises in one of their teams,” it said. “As soon as the training is ready, we want to roll it out to all employees.”
