HN Explorer

Ask HN: Is allowing home buyers to sort home searches by school rating legal?

4 points by prodigyboi ↗ HN
I noticed that online home listing services such as Zillow and Redfin provide on any given listing third party school rating data. However, one cannot sort homes using the third party school rating data and l've always wondered if it's because it's considered steering.

8 comments

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elmerfud
It's probably not illegal, although I don't know that for a fact. Those sites don't let you filter on a lot of criteria. They mostly cater to agents and secondarily to buyers. They also are still stuck in the past modes of searching for places.

You can see this how they are geared around searching and filtering based on a local you want to move to. The sites really suck if your search is largely location irrelevant and you're wanting to pick a place on let's say lowest property taxes.

giantg2
Why would it be illegal? I think many of the sites allow you to search by school district, which is somewhat similar.
giaour
School quality was sometimes used as a code phrase to communicate the racial makeup of a neighborhood, and there have been complaints filed under the Fair Housing Act about the practice[0]. A lot of real estate agents took the lesson that they just shouldn’t talk about schools.

What OP is describing would be legal if it used something like standardized test scores to rank schools but would be a different story if it used something like the John Birch Society’s subjective national school rankings.

[0]: https://www.baltimoresun.com/bs-mtblog-2009-07-what_a_real_e...

giantg2
It sounds like the app fixes the biggest objection if it shows the same info to everyone.

"The question isn't what can they say, but whether they say is said to everybody."

giaour
No disagreement here. Last time I was house shopping, realtors holding open houses wouldn’t include school ranking information in written material but would proactively announce it to everyone who walked through the door. (Black and multiracial couples attending the same open houses were given the same spiel, or at least they were when I was still in earshot.) I asked a realtor friend about it and was told it was due to a fear of FHA complaints, even though the info was not selectively communicated.
prodigyboi
Yeah so most of these online home listing sites like Zillow use some third party school ratings API. The one Zillow uses is GreatSchools.

Almost all the home listing sites allow sorting/filtering by properties that are inherent to the home such as size, price, location, number of bedrooms etc.

If you select any given home based on search criteria from the properties mentioned above, data is presented to you on that home such as school rating or even property tax information.

This sounds reasonable because you never selected the home based on a school rating.

I’m trying to figure out if choosing a home based on school rating is considered steering and hence why these sites don’t allow one to sort/filter by school rating, for example.

giaour
I don’t really see how it could be steering if the site is showing everyone the same information. Zillow probably disallows the filter for more benign reasons (maybe forcing parents to manually filter by school rating was found to increase engagement or something).
yongjik
> A lot of real estate agents took the lesson that they just shouldn’t talk about schools.

I doubt it. As a parent and homeowner in CA who also had rented in several places, "which school district does this house belongs to?" is an essential question. (And it's not like the information is hidden, anyway.) Any real estate agent who doesn't talk about schools won't go very far.