Your Hawaiʻi REALTORS® membership benefits recently expanded to include a subscription to FOREWARN, a public-records search tool built for real estate professionals like yourself. Enter a prospect’s name or phone number into FOREWARN and instantly receive a report detailing that person’s age, address history, vehicle records, phone numbers, and criminal or civil court history. The data you receive can help confirm whether the person is who they claim to be before meeting them.

But FOREWARN is a safety tool for first meetings and showings, not a screening tool for deciding whether someone is eligible to buy, sell, or rent.

  • Never use FOREWARN to make a housing decision. Federal law and FOREWARN’s own terms of service bar using FOREWARN data to decide anyone’s eligibility for housing. Unlike a credit report, which can inform a housing decision, a FOREWARN report can never inform a decision to accept, reject, or rank a buyer, seller, or rental applicant.

  • Vet everyone or no one. Running a report on one prospect but not another could open you to a fair housing claim under Hawaiʻi or federal law or to discipline under Article 10 of the National Association of REALTORS®’s Code of Ethics. So adopt a rule that you always follow: run a FOREWARN report before meeting a prospect or don’t.

  • Never search anyone who has not contacted you. Prospecting for leads, or looking up celebrities, neighbors, friends, family, or fellow licensees is prohibited. Know that FOREWARN monitors your search terms and volume. ·

  • Never share what you find. Sharing information you gain from a FOREWARN report opens you to a defamation or privacy claim, and it violates FOREWARN’s subscriber agreement. Do not disclose the contents of any FOREWARN report you order to a client, a prospect, your principal broker or broker-in-charge, any fellow agent, or any other person.

  • Never treat FOREWARN data as definitive. Public records can contain errors or outdated information. And a record that a report attributes to your prospect may in fact belong to someone else with a similar name. Read every report with professional skepticism.

Using FOREWARN correctly is simple. Check every new prospect before the first in-person meeting. Let the results inform how you meet—at the office, with a colleague, with someone who knows where you are—but not whether you will do business with the person you meet.