Make no mistake: We’re in the middle of a housing crisis here in Illinois. We need to build more housing and put more money into working peoples’ pockets so they can afford to live here.
And as we just wrapped up the commemoration of the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, we also need to ensure that everyone has access to all currently available homes for sale.
A fair housing market should be just that: fair. No one should be locked out of opportunities simply because they aren’t part of an exclusive club or don’t have the right connections.
At HOPE Fair Housing Center, our mission is to build a fairer, more transparent housing market where all Illinoisans can find their way into a safe, affordable home.
Fair housing is under serious threat as anti-discrimination teams and grant programs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development come under attack.
We need to do everything we can in Illinois to fight back against discrimination and ensure everyone has a fair opportunity at finding the next place to call home.
Right now, though, some companies are engaging in a practice that “hides” tens of thousands of home listings from all but a select few.
They’re keeping listings secret as a way to woo new clients or double-end commissions, opening the door to a new form of housing discrimination through these so-called “private listing networks” and artificially reducing the number of homes available to the general public.
In a city with a deep history of housing segregation, the thought of someone determining which houses you can even consider purchasing sounds an awful lot like redlining — an ugly, damaging policy and practice we’re still working to undo.
The National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals agrees: This practice hurts both consumers, and the small and minority real estate brokerages who are locked out of these networks.
The National Association of Real Estate Brokers, the nation’s oldest minority professional trade association, feels similarly.
Courtney Johnson Rose, president of the group, said of private listings, “The only benefit is it allows you to discriminate, and to limit the marketplace that looks at your home, and who has the ability to buy your home.” Minority real estate professionals also lose: “At the end of the day, I think that independent brokers and consumers suffer.”
We’re already seeing the effects of this new form of housing discrimination.
Listing a home privately — as opposed to on publicly accessible websites like Redfin, Realtor.com and Zillow — resulted in Chicago-area homeowners losing roughly $6,500 per sale. The effect was even more significant for homeowners in majority Black and Latino communities, who lost out on more than $7,300 per sale.
Why? Because the house has not been exposed to the full buyers’ market, ultimately hiding the house from many buyers, including Black and Brown buyers who may be working with smaller brokerages.
Despite all of this, agents are three times more likely to recommend listing privately to Black and Latino homeowners than to white homeowners.
Though listing privately can be bad for sellers, it’s almost worse for buyers, who miss out on seeing the whole universe of homes before making what for many will be the biggest financial decision of their lives. And it undermines the principles of fairness and transparency that is the basis of a housing market that works for Illinoisans.
Thankfully, there’s a solution: House Bill 3452 in the Illinois General Assembly makes it so that real estate agents have to make property listings available to everyone, giving Illinois residents a fair shot at finding a home.
Homeowners can still list their property privately if they want — and sometimes there are valid reasons to keep a home sale private, including for privacy or safety concerns — but real estate agents can’t use false promises and lies to pressure them into doing it.
This legislation makes sure that agents explain all the pros and cons of private listings so homeowners can decide what’s best for them. Information is power, and homeowners deserve to have full transparency when selling their largest asset.
There’s a lot of work to do to make our housing market fairer — to make it work for all of our residents. We need to build more housing, drive down costs, fight back against discrimination and so much more.
But at its most fundamental, we need to make sure everyone has a fair shot at the security and stability of a home. That’s why we need our representatives to pass the proposal, to bring transparency back into housing.
Michael Chavarria is executive director of HOPE Fair Housing Center.