Such a Nice Family

Downtown HartfordThis weekend I received a voicemail from an agent telling me that they just emailed me an offer for one of my listings. They also asked that I give them a follow up call so that they could tell me a little more about their buyers. I went to my email and reviewed the offer before calling them back to see if I had any questions about the offer. I didn’t, everything seemed pretty standard. So I called them back to find out what they needed to tell me.

The agent proceeded to give me a host of personal information about their buyers. Where they came from, where they worked, the ages of their children, that they were such a nice family, etc. It was touching and all. Really. A tugging at your heart strings kind of story. The problem was that it’s completely illegal to do this sort of thing.

In Connecticut it’s illegal to discriminate in commercial and residential real estate transactions on the basis of race, creed, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, age, lawful source of income, learning disability, mental retardation, familial status and mental or physical disability in the acquiring or disposition of real property.

What does this mean? In laymans terms, all a seller should care about when evaluating an offer is that the buyer can afford to purchase the home. They shouldn’t care if the buyer is a man or woman, straight or gay, white or black or green or red, does or doesn’t have children.

By giving me this information about their buyer client, this agent was most likely trying to get me to tell my seller client because they assumed that the seller would want a family to purchase the property. And what exactly did I do with this information? Absolutely nothing. I didn’t pass it along to my seller because it’s illegal for them to make a decision based on that type of information. Later the agent emailed me the same thing they told me over the phone. I scrubbed the email and removed the personal information about the buyers when I sent it to the seller.

It frustrates me that I need to do this type of self-policing. Agents should know better. Luckily I can say that I have not seen much of this. Typically agents just deliver the offer and stick to the details; price, closing date, inspection dates, deposit amounts, comps used, etc. Our contracts are written that way because that’s all either party should care about.