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A senior executive at low-cost brokerage Redfin called on the real estate industry to remove crime statistics from home listings the same day major listings portal site Realtor.com removed the data from its site. Both companies said they were concerned the statistics promoted racial bias and may not be reliable.

“We know that one of these questions [buyers have] is whether they’ll feel safe in a given home or neighborhood,” Chief Growth Officer Christian Taubman wrote in a blog post on the company’s site Monday. “But the data available don’t allow us to speak accurately to that question, and given 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.”

The company recently decided against adding crime data to its own listings portal site, he said, and urged all other listings websites to take the same course.

In a nutshell, Taubman argued, because many crimes go unreported, statistics of reported crimes as compiled by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report system may not reflect actual risk in a neighborhood. Taubman questioned whether, given the high rate at which many lower-level crimes go unsolved, 100 percent of reported crimes actually happened.

“The fact that most crimes are missing creates a real possibility that the crimes that show up in the data set skew one way or another,” he wrote.”

Taubman also raised concerns that the other major source of local crime data, the National Crime Victimization Survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, reflected racial bias because it has no mechanism to filter out any racial bias in respondents’ answers.

The same day Taubman published his post, Realtor.com CEO David Doctorow announced the company had finished removing crime maps from listing pages on its sites as part of a new fair housing push.

“In the weeks and months ahead, we plan to examine closely what neighborhood safety means for buyers and renters who use our site so we can reimagine how we integrate safety data on Realtor.com,” Doctorow wrote. “Our goal is to ensure we are providing consumers with the most valuable, fair and accurate neighborhood data so they can make informed decisions about where they want to rent or purchase their next home.”

A survey published by Redfin in late October found that half of all homeowners who moved since the pandemic started picked their new home, at least in part, due to crime and safety concerns. Cost of living and school quality were the next-most important, with 43 percent of buyers considering those factors.

The company had commissioned a survey of 1,023 U.S. renters and homeowners who had moved house since March 1, 2020. The survey was conducted between Aug. 7 and Aug. 12, and the company did not report the share of renters or homeowners in the sample.

Of the major home listings portal sites, only Trulia includes crime statistics, formatted as a heat map on each listing page, and few if any major brokerage websites do.

However, a raft of popular sites like Neighborhood Scout make crime data a core part of their reports on different locations. Neighborhood Scout, for example, calculates indexes for four types of violent crime and three types of property crimes in its reports.

Realtor.com’s and Redfin’s moves come as the real estate industry continues to grapple with how to address the biases that have crept into or been built into systems the industry relies on. Research repeatedly has shown that home values in largely-Black neighborhoods continue to lag values in largely-white neighborhoods, even after adjusting for other factors. And homes being sold by Black homeowners tend to appraise for lower values than homes being sold by white homeowners.