REALTOR® Kitty Wallace changed the way she interacts with clients after a man wanted for sex crimes kept leaving personal notes on her windshield. Listen to Drive With NAR to hear what she did next and the safety lessons she learned.

Looking at why customers contact your company in the first place can provide clues about how to remove the friction from your customer service processes, writes Bill Price, president of Driva Solutions. Price offers a nine-step process companies should go through as well as questions to assess your current customer service choke points.

Otter PR's Alaina Chiappone explains how marketers can craft the most effective value proposition for their brand, which should be based on customer and market research and compel customers to try products or services. "Your messaging across the board is driven by why people should be your customer, and your value proposition summarizes that quickly," Chiappone writes.

If borrowing costs get just a little higher, the average household may be blocked from homeownership, warns an NAR economist.

More than 90% of people believe that climate change will affect the real estate market, according to a survey of 1,000 US adults by Anytime Estimate, an online real estate education platform. Three in five people considered the likelihood of disasters when deciding where to move, but cost of living and housing prices remain the top priorities in a housing search, as 63% of people will consider buying in an at-risk area if the short-term costs are lower.

Home buyers in Canada are turning to private lenders due to challenges receiving bank financing. Stringent rules and self-employed buyers are factors driving the trend, experts say.

Smart home and internet of things technology use continues to gain momentum, with smartphones the most popular devices, per the Plume IQ Smart Home Market Report. "[I]t's evident that smart homes and IoT devices remain very much key to our connected lifestyles," says Plume's Todd Grantham.

Aryeo, a Boston-based property technology startup, has raised equity from eight investors. The company's software centralizes 3D tours, images, videos and other visual content for property listings and includes scheduling and marketing tools.

Arizona agent Barbara Guy plays a leadership role at House of Refuge, a transitional housing facility, to get more desperate families off the street.

The Milpitas Unified School District in California is asking homeowners to rent spare rooms to teachers amid an ongoing affordable housing crunch. Average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the area is close to $3,000.

The Federal Reserve has "got some work to do" as it seeks to bring inflation closer to its 2% goal, said Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Raphael Bostic. "When you bring demand down, that has the risk of slowing the economy down so that the economy stops growing," Bostic said, noting that a soft landing is "very hard" to accomplish.

In observance of Labor Day in the US, SmartBrief will not publish Monday, Sept. 5.