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Yes, it is, but there are fair housing lawsuits every year. Would you be willing to sign a document for your brokerage agreeing to defend the brokerage if someone sued it over something you wrote? You know...$100,000 in legal fees.
You have no idea how messed up it is, but it is that way because of lawsuits.
No, I wouldn't sign an agreement to *defend* the brokerage, but I would be quite willing to sign a release exempting the brokerage from liability, and stipulating that the verbiage was mine and included at my insistence. Someone filing suit over something like that would be stupid, and I would find it amusing to do battle in court with such stupidity...it would not be my first time. I'm not a lawyer, but I've played a pretty good one in court.
You don't need to walk to sled. Someone can carry you up the hill or you can go up on a motorized wheelchair and the ride down is a ride.
A kind of silly statement. You don't ride motorized wheelchairs up snow covered hills. They simply will not go.
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No, I wouldn't sign an agreement to *defend* the brokerage, but I would be quite willing to sign a release exempting the brokerage from liability, and stipulating that the verbiage was mine and included at my insistence. Someone filing suit over something like that would be stupid, and I would find it amusing to do battle in court with such stupidity...it would not be my first time. I'm not a lawyer, but I've played a pretty good one in court.
Such a statement would be worthless as a defense of a Realtor sued as it being discriminatory. What it would do however, is automatically get you named in the law suite that may result. In other words, if there was a judgement which cost the agency/agent money, you would be included in the responsibility to pay the judgement.
How do you know the hill slopes downward to the house? I grew up on top of a hill. Think about it.
Who brings food, drink and garbage to go sledding? We used to have our sleds or tubes, depending on the texture of the snow. Man, did we take some shots at the bottom of the hills...a few busted noses, and one or two cracked bones. No one had a paper cup, a can of Spam or a bottle of Mountain Dew to discard and if you did, before you got to your house, someone would have called your mom and it was all over. Seriously, who brings a picnic to a sledding hill?
Geez, no one can have fun anymore.
For truth in advertising, the ad should state: "Great sledding hill--a lawsuit waiting to happen!"
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Originally Posted by luv4horses
And people wonder why sellers feel the need to go "for sale by owner". At least you don't need to worry about these little details. Sellers (without agents) don't have such deep pockets that they would themselves be targets of such frivolous lawsuits.
Still, FSBOs are not exempt from such lawsuits.
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Originally Posted by Zymer
No, I wouldn't sign an agreement to *defend* the brokerage, but I would be quite willing to sign a release exempting the brokerage from liability, and stipulating that the verbiage was mine and included at my insistence. Someone filing suit over something like that would be stupid, and I would find it amusing to do battle in court with such stupidity...it would not be my first time. I'm not a lawyer, but I've played a pretty good one in court.
You are obviously lacking a clue as to the likely plaintiffs in such a lawsuit.
So let's take this a step further. No one should be able to advertise a home I cannot afford, because it makes me feel unworthy, unfulfilled, and unattractive. After all, one could argue that the inability to earn enough money to afford a beautiful home is shaped by nature as well as nurture. And if a person did have a disability that made sledding difficult I am sure a healthy minded individual would not benefit from avoiding the mention of sledding in any way. That is absurd.
Is that really something you want to list in the ad? If I saw that in a listing, I'd read it as "You get a big yard to maintain but one that is too steep to use for 99.5% of the year." I see "flat yard" in lots of ads but I've never, ever seen the opposite and I'm pretty sure there's a reason for that and that reason has nothing at all to do with discrimination.
When I read your sentence, I don't think the sledding hill is the bad part, but saying "family neighborhood". What's "family" to you might mean something completely different to someone else. Are you not wanting a single person to buy the house? Are you not wanting a married couple who don't plan to have kids to buy your house?
That's where it gets discriminating, when you are targeting a specific group of people, and you shouldn't be only targeting "families".
How is it discriminating to state facts of what the current environment for any given house is? The more information the better for any buyer to make an educated and well-informed house selection. Is the goal to make people have buyer's regret? To dilute the "family neighborhood"? As always, "political correctness" run amok.
WHen I was house hunting recently, yards that had hills were a turnoff. As much fun as the kids might have 2-3 days a year doing some sledding, it's unusable space the rest of the year to me.
Flat yards got higher consideration than hilly yards.
Okay, some of you folks are trying to make this make sense to you. Doesn't matter if it makes sense to you; it's the law, and agents (and sellers, whether they sell FSBO or not) have to abide by it. There are even people sent out to pretend to be buyers to see if agents and brokerages are abiding by the law and if they're caught, they can lose their license, never mind fines. (For the person upthread who spoke to the stupidity of anyone who would bring such a suit, yes, it's very obvious you haven't a clue who you would be dealing with in such a suit. You're talking big gun lawyers in federal court.)
Laws don't always make sense. Want them changed? Work for that. But don't expect your agent to break them for you. The one who does is the one who is most likely to not be an agent for very long.
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