Zumper, a home-listing site that has raised $150 million from backers like Blackstone and Kleiner Perkins, weeded out thousands of Section 8 renters in a practice some experts say may amount to discrimination
Nine current and former employees claim, and leaked data suggests, that the listings site Zumper discriminated against Section 8 tenants as it pushed in recent years into the residential-brokerage business.This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers.
The current and former employees and the leaked data suggested that Zumper — an ambitious company with backing from prestigious investors such as Blackstone, Kleiner Perkins, and Andreessen Horowitz — exacerbated patterns of prejudice that have plagued the residential market for decades. Whitley said she submitted her information to listings posted on Zumper's site. She said she also remembered filling out a Zumper profile and answering yes when asked whether she relied on a Section 8 voucher.At the time, Whitely chalked up her experience to the lack of responsiveness any renter might encounter during a search for a new home.
Whitley was among those on an internal list provided to Business Insider by a source showing thousands of Section 8 tenants who were disqualified by Zumper. The internal reason given for her dismissal was that she had been deemed "unserviceable.
Some brokerage executives worried that leads from their own listings would be funneled away to apartments that Zumper Select was trying to fill. Meanwhile, landlords who were used to advertising apartments directly to renters on Zumper balked at the idea that the company might now insert itself and charge a costly commission.
Grady told Business Insider in a written statement that Zumper's official internal policies were clear and that employees were made aware that source-of-income discrimination against tenants with a voucher was illegal under the Fair Housing Act.In a follow-up statement, Grady said: "It is true that a majority of the Section 8 renters who applied through Zumper Select were eventually disqualified due to credit requirement or their budget.
Business Insider spoke with three sources who worked on Zumper's renter-qualification team until earlier this year. They said they communicated daily with prospective renters over email, text, and telephone, gathering information such as their move-in date, income, budget, and credit score. Zumper denied that it instructed its employees to dismiss Section 8 renters or had any policy to dismiss them.
Meanwhile, Zumper engineers based in San Francisco created a system that would automate screening out renters before they could ever even get to the renter-qualification team. The source said they investigated several such cases, searching for the renter within Zumper's Salesforce lead-management system by name. In multiple instances, they said, they discovered evidence that the tenant had, in fact, previously reached out about a particular apartment but had been disqualified by the system, for no other apparent reason than disclosing that they used a Section 8 voucher.
A source showed Business Insider a report, generated by Zumper's Salesforce customer-relationship-management system, indicating that 2,597 renters in Chicago who filled out profiles on Zumper's site in 2018 and 2019 had identified themselves as using Section 8 assistance. All but 42, the report showed, were automatically disqualified by the system, a rejection rate of over 98%.
The company also declined to explain why in the records shared with Business Insider "unserviceable" almost never was used to explain the rejection of renters who said they did not use Section 8 vouchers. During the same period in 2018 and 2019, for instance, of the 26,376 renters who created profiles on Zumper's site and said they didn't rely on Section 8 vouchers, only two were deemed "unserviceable," the data showed.
The rest were disqualified for other factors, Grady said, including having budgets that were too low for Zumper's inventory of apartments, or "prior evictions, criminal records, move-in timing issues," or because they "were working with other agents" or "were no longer interested in the process."
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