Ask HN: Is allowing home buyers to sort home searches by school rating legal? 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. |
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...
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.
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.
"The question isn't what can they say, but whether they say is said to everybody."
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.