Our commitment
Fair Housing
Statehouse supports and complies with the Fair Housing Act. This page sets out what the law protects, what it means when you are running your book through a CRM, and what we have deliberately chosen not to build.
Last updated September 11, 2026
Opportunity
We are a software company, not a brokerage. We do not list, sell, rent or finance property, and we are not a party to your transactions. But software shapes what the people using it find easy to do, and a CRM sold to real estate professionals can either make discrimination harder or make it more efficient. We would like ours to do the first.
What the law protects
The federal Fair Housing Act (42 U.S.C. § 3601 and following) makes it unlawful to discriminate in the sale, rental, financing or advertising of housing on the basis of the following characteristics.
| Protected class | Includes |
|---|---|
| Race | |
| Color | |
| Religion | |
| Sex | HUD enforces this as including sexual orientation and gender identity |
| National origin | Including ancestry and, in practice, language |
| Familial status | Households with children under 18, people who are pregnant, people securing legal custody |
| Disability | Including the duty to allow reasonable modifications and to make reasonable accommodations in rules and services |
Your state almost certainly protects more than this
Many states and cities add source of income, marital status, age, military or veteran status, citizenship or immigration status, criminal history and others. Statehouse knows which state you are licensed in, but the federal list above is the floor, not the ceiling. Check your state commission and your local ordinance, and if your brokerage has a stricter policy, follow that.
What this looks like in a working day
The violations that catch working agents are rarely the obvious refusal. They are these.
Advertising
Section 804(c) makes it unlawful to make, print or publish any notice or advertisement that indicates a preference, a limitation or discrimination. That covers your listing remarks, your social posts, your flyers and the copy on your website. "Perfect for a young family", "walking distance to St Mary's", "ideal for a professional couple" and "no kids" all describe the buyer rather than the house, and describing the buyer is where this goes wrong.
Steering
Directing a buyer toward or away from neighbourhoods based on a protected characteristic, including by answering "is this a good area for people like us?" with anything other than a redirection to objective sources. Well-meant steering is still steering.
Different service
Different responsiveness, different showings offered, different qualification asked for, different terms proposed. Speed-to-lead tools make this measurable in a way it never used to be, which cuts both ways: the same data that proves you answer every lead in four minutes will also show it if you do not.
Blockbusting and redlining
Inducing sales by suggesting that people of a protected class are moving in, or treating whole areas as off limits.
What we build to help
- No protected-class fields. The CRM has nowhere to record a contact's race, religion, national origin, familial status or disability, because a field creates a habit and a habit creates a discovery document.
- A check on listing copy. On Team and Brokerage plans, listing descriptions are scanned for language commonly cited in fair housing complaints and flagged before you publish. It is an aid, not a clearance: passing it is not a defence, and no word list can catch intent.
- Matching on stated criteria only. Buyer matching scores against what the buyer actually told you they wanted, such as beds, budget and area. It does not infer anything about who they are.
- An audit trail. Documents sent, offers presented and messages delivered are recorded with times. If your conduct is ever questioned, a consistent record is the best answer available.
- Buyer representation agreements in writing. Written terms agreed up front, in plain English, make it far harder for service to quietly differ between clients.
What we will not build
This is the part of the page that costs us something, so it is the part worth writing down.
- No demographic audience targeting. We will not let you filter, segment or target a marketing audience by a protected characteristic, and we will not integrate a tool whose selling point is that capability.
- No neighbourhood "quality" scores. Composite area ratings built from school and crime data act as a proxy for race, and shipping one inside a CRM is building steering into the workflow. Where buyers want that information we point them at the public sources and let them read it themselves.
- No lead scoring on inferred identity. Lead priority is based on what a lead did, such as how they arrived and what they asked for, never on who a model guesses they are.
Where responsibility sits
You are the licensed professional. Nothing in Statehouse discharges your obligations under the Fair Housing Act, your state's equivalent, your local ordinance, your MLS rules or your association's code of ethics. Our tools are aids. Compliance is yours, and so is liability for it. This page is not legal advice; your broker of record and your attorney are.
If you have experienced discrimination
You can file a complaint with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. It is free, you do not need a lawyer, and complaints are generally accepted within one year of the conduct.
- hud.gov/fair-housing
- 1-800-669-9777 (voice), or 7-1-1 for relay service
- Your state or local fair housing agency, which may protect more than the federal list and may allow longer to file
If the conduct involved someone using Statehouse, you are welcome to tell us at hello@getstatehouse.com. We cannot adjudicate a complaint and we are not a regulator, but we can act on our own terms of service, and we would rather know.
Accessibility
We build this site and the product to be usable with a keyboard and a screen reader, to respect reduced-motion settings, and to hold readable contrast. We do not claim a conformance level we have not audited. If something here or in the product is difficult to use, write to hello@getstatehouse.com and tell us what broke and what you were using, and we will fix it.
See also our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.