The Corcoran Group is the fourth NRT, Inc. brokerage unit to be targeted by the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) for fair housing violations. While Realty Times doesn't condone fair housing discrimination, there is some question as to the legitimacy of the accusations brought by the NFHA.

The NFHA refuses to give the real estate firms it accuses the names of the offending agents and specifics of the situations in which they committed fair housing violations.

Here's how it works -- Shanna Smith, president and CEO of the NFHA, told Realty Times that HUD provides money to organizations such as hers for enforcement-based testing. Her organization has "testers" who go out in the marketplace as secret shoppers to test agents. When she finds discrimination, she sits down with the hapless broker to negotiate a settlement.

If the broker pays, NFHA gets to keep the money! And it's all legal -- fair housing laws allow anyone, including an investigating nonprofit organization, to stand as plaintiffs and collect proceeds.

If the broker doesn't pay, he's defending fair housing discrimination allegations.

That's the equivalent of Dog the Bounty Hunter being legally empowered to stalk and capture a felon and negotiate away federal charges against a felon if he pays Dog millions of dollars.

So why is NRT the lucky target of fair housing testing?

"HUD looked at the research results and gave us the names of companies to test in our metro areas and we randomly tested the agents, so it was HUD that targeted the companies," says Smith.

Apparently NRT, Inc. is big on HUD's list, because this is the fourth time NFHA has specifically targeted NRT-owned brokerages. This is particularly embarrassing to the industry because the current president of the National Association is Tom Stevens, the senior vice president of business development of NRT, Inc.

Coincidence?

These points raise the question -- is the discrimination real, or is this blackmail?

According to its press release, the NFHA has filed a "housing discrimination complaint against the Corcoran Group Real Estate, New York City’s largest residential real estate brokerage, and its parent company, NRT, Inc. NRT, Inc. is the nation’s largest residential real estate brokerage. This complaint makes the fourth housing sales discrimination complaint filed against NRT, Inc. by the Alliance."

(Apparently size matters.)

"The investigation of the Corcoran Group’s Brooklyn Heights office uncovered blatant housing discrimination against African-Americans, as well as steering of whites away from neighborhoods of color and to Prospect Heights, Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn Heights and parts of Carroll Gardens. The federal Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in housing based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability or familial status," said the release.

"In the investigation’s most egregious act of racial steering, a Corcoran Group agent produced a map of Brooklyn and drew a red outline of the areas where the white homeseeker should consider living. The agent also described the predominately white areas as having high-quality schools."

“During our 16 years of existence, the National Fair Housing Alliance has never seen such a literal and blatant example of sales steering,” said Shanna L. Smith, the Alliance’s president and CEO. “This racial steering tactic is reminiscent of discriminatory conduct from the 1970’s when real agents would go into white neighborhoods with the specific intention of triggering white flight by showing on a map where an African-American family had bought a house. This Corcoran Group agent applied a new trick - he used a map to tell whites instead where they should ‘flee to.’”

"In addition to illegally steering white and African-American homeseekers to neighborhoods where their race predominated, Corcoran Group agents provided limited service to African-Americans and withheld important financial incentives and housing information from African-Americans that were shared with whites. These actions restricted the opportunities of African American homeseekers.

If the "negotiations" are true to form, NRT and the Corcoran Group executives have not been told who the offending agents are.

"The Corcoran Group has been tremendously focused on ensuring that we are a leader in our approach to fair housing," responds Pamela Liebman, CEO, The Corcoran Group. "We take great pride in knowing that we serve diverse communities with a diverse sales force, and are committed to the principles of fair housing in everything that we do as an organization. I have been with The Corcoran Group for more than 20 years, and I am dismayed at the allegations put forth by the NHFA yesterday because we would never condone such actions by our agents. NFHA has not provided us with the names of individual agents that would enable us to conduct our own review of these claims. We will take immediate action, if warranted.”

"Over the past three years, the National Fair Housing Alliance has conducted extensive real estate sales testing in 12 metropolitan areas. Since April 2005, the Alliance has filed administrative complaints against real estate companies located in metropolitan Atlanta, GA (Coldwell Banker “The Condo Store”; Coldwell Banker Marietta; Re/Max Buckhead; Coldwell Banker Joe T. Lane Jonesboro); Detroit, MI (Detroit Century 21 Town & Country); Chicago, IL (Coldwell Banker Gold Coast; Re/Max East-West); Fairhope, AL (Manders & Company Real Estate); Westchester, NY (Peter J. Riolo Real Estate); and Long Island (Julia Stevens Realty)."

"NRT, Inc. and the Corcoran Group were targeted for the investigation by the U.S. Department of Housing Urban Development based on evidence of fair housing violations gathered during HUD’s Housing Discrimination Study 2000," says the NFHA.