"When in doubt, always follow your nose"
On discrimination and bad smells in the home search
What do you do when you encounter discrimination in real estate? How do you make a decision when the facts aren’t super clear? What process ought you follow to clarify a complex situation?
Earlier this week, I advised a tenant client to back out of a rental agreement even though the property was an ideal fit for what they were looking for. It was a tough call. I’m not sure I gave the right advice, and the client isn’t sure they made the right decision. And frankly, how could we be sure? In this case, however, there were whiffs of discrimination and injustice that gave us enough unease about moving forward that backing out seemed like the wiser move. I’ll tell the full story down below.
It’s in situations like this that I think of the classic scene in The Fellowship of the Ring where Gandalf counsels Frodo during a particularly confusing portion of their journey. There are two parts of this scene, one more famous than the other, so I’ll link to both parts:
The end of this video is the famous “so do all who live to see such times…” quote, but frankly it’s the next thirty seconds that I’d like to highlight:
On Instagram and TikTok, my handle is @homegandalf specifically because of this scene! Which bit of advice that Gandalf offered here do you think was more important: the 10,000-foot-view insight about fate and forces of good at work in the world? or the “always follow your nose” tip? On the one hand, the big-picture advice aids Frodo through his entire journey — especially towards the end. On the other, his discernment about the right path to take from the crossroads literally helps the group immediately survive the journey at hand. Both matter!
As a realtor, I hope to be a trustworthy guide in both contexts! Part of my education as a realtor has been learning to balance and incorporate these different kinds of coaching into my interactions with clients. And so, as promised, a story about making a tough decision in an ambiguous situation…
The facts
Two Fridays ago, I toured a few properties with two tenant clients who were looking to share a rental for the coming year. One of the properties matched their criteria — good location, corner unit with plenty of light from the south side of the building, two bathrooms, good price. I reached out to the listing agent as soon as we left the property, asking for instructions as to how to apply for the unit. Seeing as it was already 4PM on the Friday before a holiday weekend, I was anxious to get the process started before people unplugged until Tuesday.
The agent asked me to email someone else in their property management company who was in charge of the application, because she didn’t have any influence in that part of the process. This struck me as unusual, seeing as she was listed as the agent responsible for this unit. Why list your number and name at all if you can’t help with the application process?
Regardless, I emailed that other staff person and asked for the application. No response. The next day — Saturday — I reached out again and asked for the application. Still no response. Sunday, same thing. Frustrating! Understandable, sure: it’s the weekend. But in real estate, Time Is Of The Essence, and every hour without movement means some other buyer/tenant could come in and complicate the situation.
By Monday, I still hadn’t heard anything. Finally, on Tuesday afternoon, the application was sent to the clients, who then promptly applied.
On Wednesday, the listing agent reached out asking for walkthrough videos of the tenants’ current homes. This made me raise my eyebrows. This is unusual. I asked why they requested this, to which they responded that they ask this of all tenants because they can’t only ask their Section 8 tenants due to discrimination law. I relayed this back to my clients, who were similarly surprised. But because they wanted the place, they complied and sent the photos and videos.
Finally, on Thursday, a separate person from the property management company reached out asking about one of the tenants’ record of an eviction notice from January of 2023. This shocked me! One of the conversations I have with clients before we go into the rental process is about situations like this that might jeopardize their application — bad credit, trouble with landlords and security deposits, etc. — so that I can have those conversations with listing agents in advance. My client hadn’t mentioned anything about this to me, so I was frustrated at their lack of transparency.
So I gave the client a call, and they said they were as shocked as I was. They had a great relationship with their current landlord, and hadn’t moved in three years. I gave the PM person a callback, and asked them for their side of the story. “We looked your client’s name up in a public registry of court records and found evidence of an eviction dispute from last year.” I asked them to send me whatever documentation they had so I could review. Sure enough, there her name was listed at the top of the document describing an ongoing eviction dispute. But there was another man’s name listed there as well, and an address in a different part of the city. I called my client back.
“That’s not me!” she exclaimed into the phone. “They’re just looking up my name, not my birthday or address! I have a pretty common African name, and they’re assuming we’re the same person! I’ve never lived there, and I’m not married!”
For context: a typical rental application process involves both a credit and background check. An applicant pays a fee, and the results of those checks give the landlord enough information to decide on whether to accept the applicant. In this situation, the PM company had gone beyond the normal background check into their own version of it, finding results that didn’t actually apply to my tenant. While I don’t want to share the name of my client, her name is indeed a longer African-sounding name, which seems to have been enough justification for the PM company to assume the results they found matched with her specifically.
I called the PM person back and explained this discrepancy to him. He said he’d discuss with his team and get back to us. I didn’t hear anything back that day.
On Friday, I pinged them again, asking for resolution. They responded saying the application had been presented to the owner, and would let us know by the end of the day. I asked again at 5PM, no response.
Saturday, I asked again and got no response. Sunday same story.
Monday, the same PM person emailed again saying they had, without including me, scheduled a call with the clients for noon to discuss their application. After that interview, they’d present the application to the owner to review. What?! Didn’t you already do that? I asked the tenants how they were feeling, and again they seemed game with going through with this interview.
What would you advise?
So put yourself in my shoes: what would you advise in this situation? It’s been over a week of navigating an application process that typically takes 24-48 hours, and we still don’t have a solid answer. Instead, we have growing evidence of what is at least delay and incompetence, at most discrimination. Would the PM company or landlord have looked up a tenant’s name and assumed the results applied to them if they had a more common name? Like if her name was Katherine Smith or something? I’d argue no. This, to me, smells like discrimination based on national origin.
But are the facts incontrovertibly clear on that point? Not really, it just smells that way. And the tenants still really like this property. And they’re running out of time to find a place to live.
And to add: one of the tenants told me that if this didn’t work out, he’d have to back out of the process entirely and stay in his current rental for the coming year. That means a lower budget for the remaining tenant, and thus less commission money for the agent.
What would you advise? How would you counsel these applicants? Truly, I mean this question. What would you have said? Leave a comment! I’m not going to judge or be harsh, I’m legitimately trying to understand how you would navigate this situation.
I said no
I told them that I was sufficiently concerned at the conduct of this property management company that I thought they should go back to the search process and start over. The company had already demonstrated themselves to be frustrating to work with, and I had no reason to think that would change. Would they be competent or fair landlords during the term of the lease? I have my doubts. And would they be honest in returning the security deposit at the end of the lease? Again, I have a whole lotta doubts. So I advised they stop the process and find somewhere else.
They agreed. We backed out.
This hurts. It’s tiring. It’s frustrating. I may submit a discrimination complaint through my brokerage, but I’m tired and this isn’t a whole lot of evidence to build a case on. And the most frustrating part of it all is that we then had to go back to the well and find a new rental unit. We had to start over again.
I called the client and talked over the process with them again, explaining that I ultimately thought there was discrimination at play here.
“Oh damn!” she responded. “You see it too! I’m so used to seeing it everywhere, but I’m never sure it’s actually there! But you agree! Oh that’s a relief.” Oof, some kinda relief that is. We chatted a bit longer and made a plan to find another place.
We found a place yesterday and got the lease signed today. All is well.
“Always follow your nose”
I followed my nose on this one. Pretty much every real estate decision involves some level of asymmetric information — one side/party knows more than the other side. Good negotiation strategy hinges on understanding the information landscape and how to leverage the situation to protect your client and even the field as much as possible. But in this context, there was just too much stink for me to ignore.
I’m ready to admit that I may have made the wrong decision, but frankly none of us can really know. Whatever the result of the possible discrimination complaint, we don’t know whether this landlord would have treated these tenants with respect and honesty. And we don’t know whether this client’s new rental property will be any better than the one the said no to. We don’t know the outcome of this situation.
But the process? We do know the process we followed. And we, like good Philadelphians, trusted our process. Like Gandalf at the Moria crossroads, we followed our nose down the path that smelled less foul. Could our noses deceive us? For sure. But the air around starting the rental search over again smelled less foul than continuing on.
This is the mystery of decision making in real estate. More than almost any other choice we could ever face, deciding where to live is a sliding-doors-type decision: whole horizons of possibility and opportunity open and close based on where we choose to locate our lives. And those parallel universes are unknown to us until we actually choose one. We can’t see around the corner of the future. We can’t perfectly anticipate how our relationship to our built environment will play out. We can’t predict how the landlords/governments/banks that mediate our encounter with our homes will treat us. We have to make decisions upstream of those possible futures, based on incomplete information, implementing as trustworthy a process as we can.
I look back at this past week-and-a-half of wrestling with this property management company and feel good about my process. It hurts to advise clients into a path of action that pays me less and creates more work for me, but frankly I’m glad I traded that frustration for peace of mind. I think I did the right thing. Will I ever know if it was actually the right thing? Maybe not. But as Gandalf says, “If in doubt, Meriadoc, always follow your nose.”
What Wes is into
I had the privilege of being in attendance for my sister-in-law’s boyfriend’s first appearance in an MLB game! He got called up a few weeks ago and finally pitched on Saturday night against the Phillies. It was truly one of the most memorable sports experiences I’ve ever had. How can you not be romantic about baseball? Congratulations to Ryan!
Re: the above ^^. I’m in my annual rewatch of Moneyball. God, I love that film.
Hana and I just bought a TV for the first time in our lives. Every other TV we’ve ever had has been given to us by someone else. We bought this one, Samsung’s Frame TV. When it’s in standby mode, it displays art/photos and lies flat against the wall like a picture frame. That part of the device is certainly worth the money! But the software is absolutely terrible. I can’t believe that “smart” TVs loaded with bloatware are acceptable. Wish the FCC would push back on this kind of thing — shouldn’t I be able to decide what apps I can delete off of a device that I purchased? The TV was automatically switching to Samsung’s B-rate cable channels whenever I switched it on, and I couldn’t figure out how to turn off/delete that app. Workaround was to turn on parental controls and block literally every TV channel. But how is a “smart” TV so dumb? Leave a comment if you want to commiserate. I’ve realized that I’m probably never getting rid of the old dumb plasma screen TV we have in our living room.
Thanks for reading, friends!
Wes