Person identity & duplicates
Your contact book is yours — the relationship you have with a person. But two agents in the same brokerage can each work the same human, and one person can end up entered twice. Realm handles both cleanly: a shared person identity underneath everyone's contacts, and an owner-controlled merge for real duplicates.
Your contact vs. the shared person
Every contact you own is a private relationship: your notes, your threads, your tasks. Beneath it, Realm keeps one person per human per brokerage — a thin identity record matched by email or phone. Your contact points at that person; so does a teammate's contact for the same human.
This split matters:
- Your contact stays yours. A teammate can't see your notes or messages.
- Identity is shared, so the brokerage knows two agents are talking to the same person.
Person identity is only identity. It never decides who can see or do what — that's always your ownership and your role.
"Also worked by"
When another agent in your brokerage is working the same person, a small Also worked by chip appears on the contact's profile. It shows just enough to be useful — the agent's name and when they last touched the person — and nothing more. You never see their notes, their threads, or their pipeline. It's a heads-up ("someone else is talking to this person"), not a window into their book.
De-duplication when a contact is created
Realm avoids making duplicates in the first place. Whenever a contact is created — you add one by hand, a lead comes in from a source, or EVE captures one from an email — Realm checks whether you already own a contact with the same email. If you do, it reuses that contact and fills in only the blanks, rather than adding a second row. It never overwrites what's already there.
Crucially, this is per owner. Realm won't fold your contact into a teammate's, or theirs into yours — two agents each keeping their own contact for the same person is legitimate, and the shared person identity already links them.
Merging duplicates you already have
For duplicates that slipped in before — the same person entered twice under you — there's a manual merge in your People panel:
- Realm groups your own look-alike contacts (same email, or same name plus phone).
- You pick which contact survives.
- The others fold into it — missing fields are filled from the ones being merged, and every task, message, and history entry is re-pointed to the survivor.
Nothing is lost: history is re-pointed, never deleted. And you can only merge contacts you own — Realm never merges across agents, and never does it automatically.
Merge is deliberate and owner-controlled. Realm suggests likely duplicates; you decide whether they're really the same person and which record to keep.