Fair Housing Words to Avoid in Listing Descriptions

Why this list matters

The Fair Housing Act applies to all housing advertising, including MLS listing descriptions. Language that indicates a preference for or against a protected class can form the basis of a complaint, even without discriminatory intent. The standard is whether a reasonable person could interpret the language as expressing a preference.

CRMLS (California Regional Multiple Listing Service), the largest MLS in the United States, publishes a Fair Housing Keywords and Phrases guide that organizes terms into three categories: phrases to avoid, phrases to use with caution, and acceptable phrases. Updated in April 2025, it serves as a practical reference for agents writing public remarks.

The three lists below reproduce the complete CRMLS guide. Following them, we show where Nila June's language screening goes beyond what CRMLS recommends.

Phrases to avoid

These terms should not appear in listing descriptions. They directly reference protected classes or express preferences that violate the Fair Housing Act. CRMLS lists 97 terms in this category.

Phrases to use with caution

These terms are context-dependent. They may be appropriate in some situations but discriminatory in others. CRMLS lists 35 terms in this category. "Walking distance to," for example, could be a factual description of proximity or could imply that residents must be able to walk. "Bachelor pad" is gender-coded language that could signal a preference.

Acceptable phrases

CRMLS considers these 79 terms generally safe for use in listing descriptions. They describe property features, neighborhood characteristics, or housing types without directly referencing protected classes. Some of these, however, carry more risk than CRMLS acknowledges.

Where Nila June goes further

CRMLS provides a practical baseline, but some terms it considers acceptable or caution-worthy carry more risk than its categorization suggests. Nila June blocks several of these outright, because the potential exposure outweighs the descriptive value.

The CRMLS guide is a reference document, not an enforcement standard. Individual MLSs, state licensing boards, and HUD may apply stricter interpretations. Nila June's approach is to err on the side of caution: if a term could reasonably be read as expressing a preference, the engine avoids it.

Beyond Fair Housing: overused terms that weaken descriptions

Fair Housing compliance is about legal risk. But there's a separate category of language that weakens listing descriptions for a different reason: it's been used so many times it no longer means anything. Nila June screens for both.

These terms aren't Fair Housing violations. They're clichés that make descriptions sound generic and indistinguishable from every other listing on the MLS.

Every one of these terms appears in Nila June's output scan. If any somehow made it into a generated description, the system would flag it before delivery. In practice, they never appear because no template contains them.

How Nila June handles this

Nila June's language screening works at two layers, so flagged terms have no path into the final description.

Between these two layers, the engine's templates were written without flagged terms from the start. No template contains "master bedroom," "quiet neighborhood," "walking distance," or any of the clichés listed above. The screening layers exist as a safety net for agent-provided write-in text, not to clean up the engine's own output.