Two Major Real Estate Search Engines Nix Crime Data in Racial Equity Push

Realtor.com has removed crime data from its website, and Redfin has decided not to add it out of concerns that it could perpetuate racial inequity.

David Doctorow, the CEO of Realtor.com, said in a company update this week that the crime map layer has been removed from all search results on the website “to rethink the safety information we share on Realtor.com and how we can best integrate it as part of a consumer’s home search experience.”

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On the same day that Realtor.com announced that it was removing its crime data, Redfin came out with a full-throated denunciation of crime data being included on real estate websites. Redfin’s chief growth officer Christian Taubman announced that, after consideration, the company would not be adding crime data to its own platform.

Taubman said that Redfin had been weighing whether to add information about crime because one of the metrics that consumers consider when looking for a home to purchase is how safe the area around that home is. The company concluded that available crime data doesn’t accurately answer that question, and “given the long history of redlining and racist housing covenants in the United States there’s too great a risk of this inaccuracy reinforcing racial bias.”

Redfin highlighted the difference between crime and safety and said that through its research, which included surveys, people defined safety in a variety of ways. {snip}

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In addition to the FBI’s metrics, Redfin also considered the National Crime Victimization Survey, which relies on interviews from tens of thousands of people annually and queries them about the frequency, characteristics, and consequences of criminal victimization across the country. {snip}

Taubman said that while the survey includes information on unreported crimes, because it is a survey, if respondents’ responses are racially biased, that bias would be reflected in the crime data.

“And there are troubling signs of this: in the 2019 survey, people reporting crimes were more likely to describe their offender as young, male, and Black than would be expected given the representation of those groups in the population,” he said.

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