Trulia, one of Seattle-based Zillow Group’s real estate brands, says it will phase out the use of neighborhood crime data on home listings early next year, citing the potential for bias and inaccuracies.
The announcement follows a post last week in which Seattle-based Redfin said it considered adding crime information to Redfin.com but decided against it.
“[G]iven 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,” Christian Taubman, Redfin’s chief growth officer, wrote in the Dec. 13 post. “We believe that Redfin–and all real estate sites–should not show neighborhood crime data.”
Realtor.com also announced last week that it was discontinuing the practice.
Real estate news site Inman first reported news of Trulia’s decision on Tuesday.
A Trulia spokesperson provided this statement to GeekWire:
“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.”
Zillow.com doesn’t display crime data. Zillow Group acquired San Francisco-based Trulia for $2.5 billion in 2015.