Even if you dislike camera phones for their potential intrusiveness, you have to admit they have obvious utility to the real estate business.

For one thing, they enable agents to alert clients to new properties, something that could be an edge in a hot market, where "getting there first" may be crucial.

But a company in Marietta, Ga., has devised another real estate use for the devices -- as a form of insurance.

Next month, RealSafe.net Network will begin marketing a system for real estate agents who are less interested in photographing properties than in having a permanent record of who is with them in vacant houses. The system transmits camera-phone digital photos of the clients (with their permission) to a secure database.

It is meant to deter crime.

"The real estate industry is not as safe as it used to be," says Pat Dougherty, a Marietta agent for 22 years who founded the company after an incident with a man who asked her to show him a house on short notice.

She said that though such urgent requests aren't unusual in real estate sales, she had qualms about the caller because of an earlier threatening incident in the area involving another real estate agent. So, she asked another agent to accompany her for the showing, which turned out to be uneventful.

"Afterward, we started talking about how this would have been a good time to have a camera phone," Daugherty says.

The two agents began to develop the idea, and in January their firm will begin marketing its services to real estate agents.

The program works this way: Agents ask prospective buyers for permission to photograph them as a security measure. The image immediately goes to what she describes as a "secure database" where it won't be used for any other purpose.

The company policy forbids anyone to access the images except under court order, and the would-be buyer can be assured that his or her face won't show up on the Internet the next day, she says.

"The yard signs will say `This is a RealSafe.net home,' and there will be signs in the windows," Daugherty says, so there will be some name recognition," and also some reassurance for the homeowner who will know that a record is being kept of who enters their home -- at least, when the house is being shown by an agent who pays a monthly fee to Dougherty's firm.

She says that agents will be trained in explaining to camera-shy buyers how the practice is no different than the many other times each day that individuals are photographed by security cameras.

"If they refuse to allow the picture to be taken, I won't take them into the house," says Dougherty, who says she has not been turned down by anyone she has asked.

Certainly, a convincing case can be made for taking more precautions. Though specific numbers aren't available, the news stories of agents being attacked or killed on the job are easy to come by. Some realty agencies now require prospective buyers to stop at the company's office first and produce identification.

But Dougherty sees the service as being useful beyond the realty industry -- by apartment-leasing agents, car dealers, employees who are out in the field, "anybody who puts himself in a position where they are alone with somebody they're not sure about," she says. "You could use this with people you meet through Internet-dating services."

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Hear Mary Umberger on WBBM Newsradio 780 at 6:21 p.m. and 10:22 p.m. each Thursday and Friday and 7:20 a.m. each Saturday and Sunday.