Barcelona persists in the strategy of shedding light on and tackling discrimination, especially that which makes it difficult and goes as far as preventing migrants and racialized people from accessing rental housing. After a first study presented last year, and two sanctions, one for offering housing “only to Spaniards” and the other for a case of direct discrimination, the first in the whole state, the City Council has concluded a second sociological study, entitled “A la carte discrimination” that detects new evidence of this discriminatory practice in the sector.
In this case, the study has consisted of fieldwork with 350 valid calls to different real estate agencies operating in the city on behalf of a fictitious property owner that wants to rent their home and requests that “immigrants” are excluded from the selection process. From the answers obtained from the contacted real estate agents, it is clear that a large majority explicitly accepts discrimination:
– Acceptance of discrimination: in 62% of cases, the agent accepts the discriminatory claim, leaving the indicated profile out of the selection process.
– Facilitation of discrimination: in 24% of cases the acceptance of discrimination is not direct but several practices are detected that also result in the indicated group being excluded from access to the home.
– No ethnic discrimination: in 10% of cases the agent refuses to accept the discriminatory proposal.
– Evasion of the response: in 4% of cases the agent avoids responding to the request.
The aim of carrying out these studies is to be able to situate and quantify the extent of this type of discrimination and the extent to which it is standardized in the sector, and to be able to work together with agents and entities to eradicate it. In this sense, the results have been transferred to the Catalan Association of Real Estate Administrators (APIs) and the Chamber of Urban Property ,and the resources offered by the Office for Non-Discrimination (OND), which are training, resources and mediation, have been made available to them.
Presence of prejudices and stereotypes
In the discriminatory petition by the fictitious property owner, the term “immigrant” is consciously chosen, without further explanation of ethnic origin, religion or social class, which is interpreted as discriminating against those people who come from certain countries. Thus, throughout the experiment, the answers from real estate agents show a clear distinction between the “immigrant” population, which would respond to the discriminated profile, and the “foreign” population, which would be outside the target audience.
Another important aspect that comes to light during the study is that it is a shadow practice. 19.4% of agents spontaneously state that this discrimination cannot be advertised, without the fictitious ownership having required the filter to be applied in the property ad.
The fact that discrimination is never advertised or made explicit by real estate agents becomes a major difficulty in proving that it occurs. Secondly, the use of deception and lies against discriminated people, strategies that agents admit to and are included in the study, put even more obstacles in the way of being able to prove it and, therefore, persecute it, sanction it, and repair the damage.
More discrimination between non-affiliated agencies
The study “A la carte discrimination” has made it possible to detect substantial differences between the behavior of affiliated agencies and those of non-affiliated agencies. Although the acceptance of discrimination is mainstream among both members and non-members, in the latter they account for three out of four agents, a proportion that drops to slightly below half among members. At the same time, agents who reject all discrimination among members represent a higher proportion, 15%, while those who are not have a proportion of only 5%.
Regarding the design of the sample, data from the Register of Real Estate Agents of Catalonia has been used, which states that at the end of 2020, 2,358 agents were operating in the city. A minimum sample of 330 agents was required for the data from the study to be representative with 95% confidence and a +/- 5% maximum margin of error.