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Anthony:
Housing discrimination study, have you read the article on it? It’s pretty disturbing. Certainly not something that anybody should be doing in any industry. It’s embarrassing that it was done on our industry of real estate. I’m hoping that we can learn from it. One of the things that I wanted to talk about today with you all right here from the Inman Conference in New York is a little bit about that happening and the folks who did the study was just on stage with Brad Inman.
Brad was talking to them about how they really did do a thorough investigation, and they crossed all their T’s, dotted all their eyes. I know there’s some people that don’t think they did, and there’s going to be haters and things like that. The fact is, I think some things happen that shouldn’t have, and there was some prejudging going on that shouldn’t have been done. Now, maybe in some cases it was for personal beliefs, which I think is pretty damn sad if that’s the case.
I think in some cases, it was a matter of prejudging leads. I’ve talked to you guys about this before when I’ve made comments about asking people too many questions, over qualifying them from the beginning, that kind of falls in the same area that that is and it’s not a smart thing to do. Now, obviously, I’m trying to be careful here and articulate my message not to be getting into some kind of political or belief system argument, though I wholeheartedly disagree with anybody that would be discriminating against anyone for any reason, being taller, whatever.
I don’t think that’s right. I also think that in our business is way too much prejudging going on. Take for example, when someone walks in a home and maybe they’re not dressed that nice or maybe they’re young. It is hard for us humans not to stereotype but you need to be very careful of it. I have news for you. There are very wealthy people that don’t dress well. There are people who can very easily afford a home that don’t dress well, don’t drive nice cars, maybe don’t flaunt their ability financially.
If you’re too quick to prejudge them, you could end up hurting yourself. You should think about that because you could be missing out on business. It’s not a nice way to treat people. I remember when I was younger that I bought properties when I was 20– First property I ever bought, I had just turned 21 on the closing, like the week after we closed. I will tell you, when I went out and looked at properties, I used to get aggravated sometimes that I could tell people who are looking at me like, “Can this guy afford this?”
Well, the fact is I could.
I started working extremely young. I started saving money extremely young. Then I could afford to buy a property at that time, and it irritated me a great deal. Now, not nearly as much as it would irritate someone who was discriminated against for other reasons. I just want to say that we realtors need to be very careful. We need to remember our fair housing laws, remember our ethics as realtors, and remember that you have a dramatic impact on people’s lives, on people’s ability to buy a home.
Think about how near and dear your home is to you. You could get in the away with that. That could affect people for years to come, affect their children where their children live. Don’t ever take lightly what we do and let’s not prejudge leads, obviously. I was going to say obviously, not be discriminatory. It’s a terrible thing. I think that our industry can learn from that and hopefully correct it. I’m going to post that article in the comments of this video. I hope people take a look at it and learn from it and leave your comments.