Finding a home should allow buyers to explore every neighborhood that meets their needs and budget. Yet some buyers enter the market without realizing that their choices may already be narrowing.
Real estate steering occurs when housing professionals influence where people look for homes, or discourage them from considering certain communities, based on race or another protected characteristic. It may be overt, but modern steering often hides within polite recommendations, selective information, and supposedly helpful advice.
Steering Does Not Always Sound Discriminatory
Many people imagine housing discrimination as an agent explicitly refusing to serve a client. Steering is usually harder to recognize.
An agent might repeatedly recommend homes in one area while overlooking comparable properties elsewhere. A buyer may hear that a particular neighborhood is not “the right fit,” that another community would make them “more comfortable,” or that certain schools are “better.” Listings may arrive late, showing requests may receive different levels of urgency, or important neighborhood information may be shared selectively.
Each action can appear harmless in isolation. Together, they can shape a buyer’s entire search.
Information Can Become a Gate
Real estate professionals possess knowledge, relationships, and access that consumers may not have. They know how quickly listings move, which questions to ask, and how to navigate negotiations, inspections, financing, and local practices.
That expertise can expand opportunity when it is shared fairly. It can restrict opportunity when clients receive different listings, levels of encouragement, or professional attention.
A buyer cannot seriously consider a home they never see. When an agent filters choices using assumptions about who belongs in a neighborhood, discrimination occurs before the buyer has an opportunity to decide.
Coded Language Can Preserve Segregation
Words such as “safe,” “stable,” “changing,” “good,” “rough,” or “family-friendly” may sound neutral. However, they can carry racial or socioeconomic meanings, particularly when they replace objective information.
Steering does not require an agent to hold openly hostile beliefs. A professional may believe they are protecting a client or responding to perceived preferences. But assumptions based on identity can reproduce segregation even when they are presented as personalized service.
Ethical professionals should give clients access to complete housing options and direct them toward reliable, independent sources for information about schools, crime, transportation, and community services.
The Effects Extend Beyond One Transaction
Steering affects more than where one family lives. Neighborhood location influences school access, employment opportunities, transportation, healthcare, environmental conditions, public services, and property appreciation.
When groups of buyers are repeatedly guided toward or away from particular communities, individual interactions become a wider pattern. Those patterns can reinforce segregation, concentrate investment, and shape generational wealth.
The result is a market that appears open while quietly distributing opportunity along familiar boundaries.
Turn Awareness into Better Housing Decisions
Steering thrives when restricted choices look like ordinary professional advice. Challenging it begins with learning how to distinguish genuine guidance from assumptions that quietly determine where buyers are encouraged to live.
That is where Breaking Barriers: Confronting Racism in American Real Estate becomes especially valuable. Dr. Zakk Varughese takes readers beyond familiar accounts of overt discrimination and into the everyday language, relationships, and decisions that shape modern housing access. Drawing on two decades of experience as a Black real estate broker in the Deep South, he explains what buyers should notice, what ethical professionals should question, and what institutions must measure more honestly.
For buyers, the book offers a clearer way to evaluate the information and options they receive. For agents and brokers, it provides a framework for examining listing practices, client communication, referrals, and unconscious assumptions. For educators and industry leaders, its discussion guides and practical tools can support training that moves beyond checking a compliance box.
Bring Breaking Barriers into your next brokerage meeting, professional-development program, classroom, or community conversation. Use it to review how choices are presented, ask who may be receiving fewer opportunities, and begin building a housing culture in which every client, not the system, decides where they belong. Purchase your copy today!