The Fair Housing Words Hiding in Your Brokerage Website

Search for fair housing words to avoid and you get a list. Usually an MLS compliance page, an association handout, or a PDF that has been photocopied through four brokerages since 2009. The lists are broadly fine. They are also the least useful tool you can bring to a brokerage website, for two reasons: the list is not the law, and the listing description is not where your exposure lives.

What the rule actually says

The operative sentence is one subsection of the Fair Housing Act. It makes it unlawful:

One thing the statute does not do is give small transactions a pass. Section 3603(b) exempts certain owner-sold houses and small owner-occupied buildings from § 3604, and it exempts them from every subsection except this one. Advertising has no carve-out.

Seven protected classes at the federal level: race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, national origin. Your state almost certainly adds more, and the additions vary enough that a national word list cannot cover them.

Two notes a bare list of seven will not give you. Federal enforcement of “sex” as covering sexual orientation and gender identity has moved twice since 2021, most recently in January 2025, so a brokerage taking its posture from the federal position alone is tracking a line that moves. And state and local law is the larger part of the picture in most markets: sexual orientation, gender identity, source of income, age, marital status and military status are protected in many jurisdictions and not in others. Which ones apply to you is a question about where you are licensed, and it is not one a national word list can answer.

The implementing regulation, 24 CFR § 100.75, extends the same prohibition to all written or oral notices or statements by a person engaged in the sale or rental of a dwelling, and § 100.75(c)(1) spells out that discriminatory practice includes using “words, phrases, photographs, illustrations, symbols or forms which convey that dwellings are available or not available to a particular group of persons because of race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin.”

The closing clause is the whole limit, and it is the half everyone drops. The rule does not reach every statement about who a property suits. It reaches statements that sort buyers by a protected class. “Investor opportunity” is a market segment. “Perfect for a young family” is a protected class.

Read that phrase twice, because it is the one everybody skips. Photographs and illustrations are named in the regulation. A page with no forbidden word on it can still indicate a preference.

The list everyone quotes was removed from the CFR thirty years ago

The word lists in circulation descend from 24 CFR Part 109, HUD’s Fair Housing Advertising guidelines. Part 109 was removed from the Code of Federal Regulations effective May 1, 1996 as part of a regulatory reinvention and streamlining initiative (61 FR 14378, Apr. 1, 1996, Docket No. FR-4029-F-01). HUD said at the time that the material was helpful and that it would provide the same nonbinding guidance through handbooks and other materials rather than keep it in title 24. But it is guidance, and it has been guidance for three decades.

There is a small piece of trivia here that tells you how much attention this corner of the rules gets: 24 CFR § 100.75(d) still refers the reader to Part 109 for guidance on nondiscriminatory advertising. The live regulation points at a part that has not been in the CFR since 1996.

None of which makes the guidance safe to ignore. It makes it the wrong instrument. Enforcement runs on the statute, and the statute asks a question a word list cannot answer.

Why a word list is the wrong instrument

The statutory test is whether the statement indicates a preference to an ordinary reader. That is a question about a sentence, not a token.

• “Family room” is a room. “Perfect for families” is a statement about who should live there. Same word, different sentence, different answer.
• “Walk to the beach” describes a distance. “Great for active buyers who can handle the stairs” describes a capability.
• “Near St. Anne’s” is a landmark if the reader takes it as a location and a signal if the reader takes it as a congregation. Context decides, and context is exactly what a find-and-replace cannot see.

So a pass against a word list will clear copy that is a problem and flag copy that is not. It is the wrong shape of tool, for the same reason a spell checker is not a proofreader.

The productive question is not which words. It is which surfaces, because the risk on a brokerage website is overwhelmingly a function of where the copy came from and who has read it since.

Eleven surfaces where it hides, and who built each one

Roughly in order of how much unreviewed text sits on each one.

1. IDX-imported listing remarks

Your site displays agent remarks written by hundreds of people who do not work for you, updated on a feed, and read by nobody on your side before they appear. You did not write them. Under § 3604(c) that distinction does less work than brokerages expect, because the verbs are make, print, or publish.

2. Neighborhood and community pages

In the brokerage sites we review, the surface that most often turns up unreviewed copy, and the one most likely to have been generated in bulk. The line that matters: a neighborhood page should describe the place, not the people. Schools, amenities, commute times, housing stock and price bands are the place. Who lives there, what they believe, what kind of family fits in, and any adjective standing in for a demographic are the people. A page that describes the people is a steering document with a map on it.

3. Agent bios

Written by the agent, pasted in by whoever built the site, never reviewed again. Bios are where affiliations, community-service framing and language capability show up, all of which are fine as fact and become a problem when phrased as who the agent serves.

4. Photography and illustration

Named in the regulation, and the subject of the leading case. If every person pictured across a site’s lifestyle photography reads as one demographic, the site is making a statement whether or not anyone intended one. This applies to generated imagery too, which inherits whatever the model considers a default homebuyer.

5. Image alt text

Alt text is published copy. It is also the copy least likely to have been read by a human since the day it was written, and on many sites it was written by a tool.

6. The blog archive

Sort your blog oldest-first and read the bottom of it. Those posts are indexed, they are usually from two vendors ago, and nobody has opened them in years.

7. Intake forms

Every optional field is a question you have chosen to ask. Some of them you may not ask, and a dropdown is a written statement.

8. Automated replies and follow-up sequences

Written once, sent ten thousand times, reviewed never. If a drip template segments buyers in a way that maps onto a protected class, that is not one message. It is every message it has ever sent.

A drip template is written once and can be read once. A chatbot or AI concierge writes a new sentence every time someone asks whether a neighborhood is good for families, and nobody reviews it in advance. That output is your brokerage’s own statement, published on your own domain. There is no third-party author to point at.

9. Search filters, saved searches and lead routing

Your search interface is not third-party content. It is a product you built. A filter set, a default map boundary, a “recommended for you” module, or a routing rule that assigns inquiries by ZIP code are all decisions the brokerage made about which buyers see which homes. This is the surface closest to the facts of Roommates.com, and it is the one least likely to be reviewed by anyone whose job is copy.

10. Paid ad targeting

24 CFR § 100.75(c)(3) reaches “selecting media or locations for advertising the sale or rental of dwellings which deny particular segments of the housing market information about housing opportunities.” That is ad targeting, described in 1989 language. Housing is a restricted category on the major ad platforms for exactly this reason, and the targeting options available to you there are deliberately narrower than for other advertisers. If you run housing ads, confirm they are set up in the housing category rather than assuming the platform will catch it.

11. The footer

This one is a presence problem rather than a language problem, which is why a copy review never finds it. The Equal Housing Opportunity logo or slogan, your brokerage’s licensed name adjacent to your contact information, and your accessibility statement are the first three things a regulator checks, and they take about a minute. Former 24 CFR § 109.30(a) is where the logo practice comes from. That part is gone; the expectation is not. It survives in HUD program requirements, in most MLS rules of participation, and in state commission advertising rules.

The part brokerages get wrong: who is liable

The leading case is old, and it is about a newspaper. In Ragin v. New York Times Co., the Second Circuit affirmed the denial of the Times’s motion to dismiss a § 3604(c) claim over real estate advertisements the Times had not written, and rejected the argument that the First Amendment shielded it.

Ragin v. New York Times Co., 923 F.2d 995 (2d Cir. 1991)

Read the limits too, because the same opinion supplies them. The complaint alleged a pattern running about twenty years. The court said plainly that an advertisement depicting a single model or couple of one race, run only two or three times, would seem to fall outside § 3604(c) as a matter of law absent other direct evidence of an intentional racial message. And the case never reached liability. It decided the complaint could go forward.

Then Congress changed the ground under it

Ragin was decided in 1991. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act arrived in 1996, and it says an interactive computer service is not treated as the publisher of information provided by someone else. Two appellate decisions in 2008 drew the line for housing:

• In Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law v. Craigslist, the Seventh Circuit held § 230 barred a § 3604(c) claim against Craigslist over discriminatory housing ads its users had written. 519 F.3d 666 (7th Cir. 2008).
• In Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates.com, the Ninth Circuit sitting en banc held the opposite where the site built the discrimination in: required drop-down questions about sex and family status, and a search that filtered on the answers. The free-text comment box, which the site merely displayed, stayed protected. 521 F.3d 1157 (9th Cir. 2008) (en banc).

So the honest answer on IDX remarks is narrower than the trade press usually gives it, and more useful. A remark you display verbatim, unedited, exactly as the listing agent wrote it, has a real argument behind it. That argument weakens the moment you edit the text, summarize it, feed it to a model, or build a feature on top of it.

Which reorders the list. The surfaces where a brokerage is most exposed are the ones it authored: the neighborhood pages, the search filters, the intake form drop-downs, the drip templates, the photography it chose. None of those is third-party content under any reading. Roommates.com is the case about a drop-down menu, and every brokerage site has drop-down menus.

None of which is a reason to leave the feed unread. Section 230 is a shield against civil liability in court. It does not answer to your MLS, which can pull a feed under its own rules of participation. It does not answer to your state real estate commission, which licenses you. It does not answer to Article 10 if you are a REALTOR. And it does nothing at all for the copy you wrote yourself, which on most brokerage sites is where the problem was.

The rules that actually produce discipline

Fair housing complaints go to HUD or a state agency and take time. Your state real estate commission is closer and faster, and its advertising rules are separate. Most states require the brokerage’s licensed name adjacent to your contact information on every advertising surface, and that includes the website. New York goes further: its rules require the state’s fair housing notice to be displayed prominently on every website a licensee operates, with a link to it on the homepage (19 NYCRR § 175.29). Look up your own state’s advertising rule and read it once. It is short, and a violation of it is far easier to prove than a fair housing violation.

A 20-minute audit you can run today

None of this requires a vendor. It requires an afternoon and a willingness to read your own site.

• Search your own domain. Run a site: query against your brokerage domain paired with demographic and religious terms. You are looking for pages you forgot exist.
• Open three neighborhood pages. For each paragraph ask one question: is this describing the place or the people?
• Read ten IDX descriptions as they render on your site, not as they look in the MLS.
• Read every agent bio. All of them. It is the fastest item on this list and the one most likely to surprise you.
• Look at your photography as a set. Not image by image. The set is what makes the statement.
• Spot-check alt text on the lifestyle imagery, which is where descriptive alt text turns into description of people.
• Sort the blog oldest-first and read the last page of it.
• Submit your own contact form and read what comes back.

Write down what you change and when. A record of review cuts both ways, so decide with counsel how you keep it. Documented remediation is evidence of good faith. A file that logs a problem you then leave in place is evidence of notice, and a self-audit run without counsel is generally discoverable, while the same review run at the direction of your attorney may not be. If you expect to find real problems, make the call to counsel before the pass, not after it.

Then the question that actually matters

You can clear all eleven surfaces in an afternoon. Now answer this one: who does it again next month, after forty new listings land on the feed, three agents join, and whatever your content tool wrote over the weekend goes live?

For most brokerages the honest answer is nobody, and not out of carelessness. It is a structural problem. No single party can see the whole surface. The website vendor owns the template but not the feed. The MLS owns the feed but not your pages. The agents own their bios. The marketing contractor owns the blog and left in March. Compliance is the one job that does not survive being split six ways, because the gaps between the six are exactly where unreviewed copy accumulates.

That is the argument for one party holding the whole estate: the domain, the site, the IDX integration, the content pipeline and the automated messages, with a standing review that runs on a schedule instead of after a complaint. Not because a brokerage cannot do this itself. Because doing it once is easy and doing it every month for years is a job, and jobs need an owner.

Fair Housing website compliance FAQ

General information, not legal advice. NovraScale is not a law firm. Confirm anything below with counsel licensed in your state.

Is there an official HUD list of fair housing words to avoid?

No. The lists in circulation descend from 24 CFR Part 109, HUD’s Fair Housing Advertising guidelines, which were removed from the Code of Federal Regulations effective May 1, 1996. HUD said it would provide the same nonbinding guidance through handbooks rather than keep it in the CFR, so the lists remain a reasonable starting point. They are not law, they are not exhaustive, and passing a word check is not a compliance review.

What law actually governs real estate advertising?

42 U.S.C. § 3604(c) makes it unlawful to make, print or publish any notice, statement or advertisement about the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates a preference, limitation or discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status or national origin. 24 CFR § 100.75 implements it and extends it to all written or oral notices and statements. State law adds protected classes on top, and state real estate commissions impose separate advertising requirements such as brokerage name and license disclosure. This is general information, not legal advice. NovraScale is not a law firm.

Can a brokerage be liable for a listing description written by another agent?

It depends on how much of it you built, and it is a question for your own counsel on your own facts. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act says an interactive computer service is not treated as the publisher of content provided by someone else, and in Chicago Lawyers’ Committee v. Craigslist, 519 F.3d 666 (7th Cir. 2008), that barred a § 3604(c) claim against a website over discriminatory housing ads its users wrote. But in Fair Housing Council of San Fernando Valley v. Roommates.com, 521 F.3d 1157 (9th Cir. 2008) (en banc), a site that required users to answer drop-down questions about sex and family status, and filtered searches on the answers, lost that protection because it helped create the content. Verbatim display of another agent’s remark sits closer to Craigslist. Anything you edit, summarize, generate, or build a filter on sits closer to Roommates.com. Review the feed either way: your MLS rules and your state license law are separate from § 230. This is general information, not legal advice. NovraScale is not a law firm.

Do photographs count, or only words?

They count. 24 CFR § 100.75(c)(1) names words, phrases, photographs, illustrations, symbols and forms. Ragin itself concerned the people depicted in real estate advertising rather than the wording. Review your imagery as a set, because the pattern across a site is what conveys availability, not any single photograph.

Are AI-generated neighborhood pages a fair housing risk?

In our experience they are where the most unreviewed copy sits, for two reasons. They are produced faster than anyone reviews them, and community descriptions are the natural place for language about who lives somewhere. Hold every generated page to the same line: describe the place, never the people. Nothing about generated copy changes who is responsible for publishing it.

How often should a brokerage website be reviewed?

Continuously for anything on a feed, since IDX remarks change without you touching the site, and on a fixed schedule for everything else. In practice: a full pass across all eleven surfaces at least quarterly, plus a review whenever agents are added, a content batch is published, or a vendor changes. Keep a dated record of each pass, and settle with counsel how that record is kept before you start, since a self-audit log is generally discoverable and a logged problem left in place is evidence of notice.