Reaction: Trulia to drop neighborhood crime data from home listings, after Redfin speaks out against practice

The articles Speak to remove neighborhood crime data from home listings. The original source of the article comes directly from Redfin.com discussing why neighborhood crime data shouldn’t be on Real Estate websites.

In Summary: 

1. Redlining and racist housing covenants prove there’s too great a risk of this inaccuracy reinforcing racial bias.

2. People define and evaluate safety differently 

3. Unreported crimes skew accuracy 

To make matters worse it looks like Trulia may follow suit. I struggle with this concept as I read this article since we rely heavily on Trulia.com and their data to display crime levels throughout Baltimore City, Maryland.

Prior to reading this article the initial emotion is fear and shock. The more I think about it, the more I can understand and believe the reasoning behind it. However, this lies as a direct problem with our business process. Could we adjust our business process? Yes. 

However, admittedly I like doing things this way as it makes sense and is a fast and easy step to conduct our initial screening criteria.

We’ve written down our list of criteria as a low or moderate crime neighborhood. This means if a property happens to be in a high-crime area then we remove the property from contention. The very first step that we take, is to quite literally enter the full street address into Trulia.com so that we may capture the crime data, be it low, moderate, or high.

 The old real estate adage: buy a bad property on a good street – makes sense here as it is one of the first steps to ensure that we are buying a property in a good neighborhood.

Since one cannot change the property location this is of the utmost importance. I can rehab the property inside and out to my heart’s content however the property will always remain in that lot in that streets, in that neighborhood.

 If the property is determined to be high, then our initial screening is completely over for that property and I immediately move on to the next one. 

As a real estate investor it’s a numbers game. The more properties I analyze, the greater the  opportunity I have to be able to find a property that is a great deal. 

A Trulia spokesperson’s statement:

“Trulia is committed to providing consumers with tools, services and information to help them make informed decisions about real estate. To achieve this, we continuously review the display of publicly available data to ensure accuracy, equity, and transparency. Public safety data is defined and measured differently across communities — which may perpetuate bias in real estate and present challenges with providing accurate crime data from our vendors. Because of this, Trulia will no longer display crime data on our site as of early 2022. We will continue to develop tools and publish information that can help serve as a starting point in a consumer’s home buying process.”

Read the full article here: https://www.geekwire.com/2021/trulia-to-drop-neighborhood-crime-data-from-home-listings-after-redfin-speaks-out-against-practice/ 

Original Article found here: Neighborhood Crime Data Doesn’t Belong on Real Estate Sites: https://www.redfin.com/news/neighborhood-crime-data-doesnt-belong-on-real-estate-sites/