[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...

[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.

[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.