Property managers sued over ads
SILVER SPRING, Maryland — Some of the U.S. leading property management companies deliberately excluded older people from seeing Facebook advertisements for dozens of apartment complexes in the Washington, D.C., area, a housing watchdog alleged in a lawsuit filed Wednesday.
The Housing Rights Initiative billed its federal class action as the first lawsuit to accuse residential property management companies of engaging in “digital discrimination” in housing advertising.
Anyone over 50 was deemed to be too old to receive housing ads on Facebook for the 10 companies named as defendants in the lawsuit filed in Maryland, the New York-based non-profit said.
“They knowingly decided not to advertise their rental properties to older people when they recruited prospective tenants via Facebook because they wanted to steer away older people from their properties and attract younger tenants,” the suit says.
Facebook isn’t named as a defendant in the non-profit’s lawsuit, but the federal government has accused the socialmedia giant of discrimination for allowing landlords and real estate brokers to systematically exclude non-Christians, immigrants, minorities and other groups from seeing ads for houses and apartments.
Steve Hallsey, managing director of Wood Residential Services’ parent company, which is named in the lawsuit, said: “This lawsuit has absolutely no merit and we believe it will be rejected by the courts,” Hallsey said.
Representatives of other companies didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The suit says “several leaders in the industry that manage hundreds of thousands of apartments nationally . . . paid substantial sums of money to Facebook to categorically withhold their ads from older people.”
The housing watchdog is seeking unspecified damages and asking the court to bar the 10 companies from advertising on Facebook until the platform “no longer uses a discriminatory algorithm to determine the recipients of advertisements.”
Facebook and its advertisers know the age of users because they must disclose their birth dates. Facebook uses that information to encourage advertisers to target ads based on a user’s age, the suit claims.