Neighborhood Crime Data Doesn’t Belong on Real Estate Sites
That just adds an extra step to my real estate research efforts.
I think there's a possible range of motivations for Redfin's choice, and I don't know which ones contributed to this decision by their management & marketing teams — but OTOH I don't really care. Avoiding allegations of contributing to structural racism or bias is simply not my problem. Risk management is.
If I'm getting ready to buy property and have significantly narrowed down my choices, I'll move from publicly-available free reports to the paid output of commercial risk assessment firms like CAP Index [0] (which are excellent and accurate in my experience). To do otherwise seems like folly, but of course everyone is free to make their own decision.
Do local public school ratings belong on real estate sites?
They don't want to exacerbate racial disparities, which is noble. They could have used that as their sole justification, but for some reason they also try to say that the crime datasets are inaccurate. Their reasoning for this is surprisingly weak. Regarding the National Crime Victimization Survey: "And there are troubling signs of this [racial bias]: 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."
doesn't matter what redfin does, zillow ate their lunch a long time ago.