What actually governs, and how it works
The statute is unchanged. Section 3604(c) makes it unlawful to make, print, or publish any notice, statement, or advertisement about the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates a prohibited preference, limitation, or discrimination. The characteristics it names are race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, and national origin, and the section reaches any stated intention to make such a preference.2
HUD's current regulation restates that prohibition and describes its reach. It applies to all written or oral notices or statements by a person engaged in the sale or rental of a dwelling. Applications, flyers, brochures, deeds, signs, banners, posters, and billboards are named among them. It prohibits the use of words, phrases, photographs, illustrations, symbols, or forms that convey that dwellings are available or unavailable to a particular group. It also reaches the selection of media or locations that denies a segment of the housing market information about available opportunities.3
Two features of that text matter to anyone writing a listing. It covers images and symbols, not only words. And it turns on what the advertisement indicates, which is a question about context rather than about vocabulary.
Why a word list is the wrong tool
A word list encourages two errors in opposite directions, and the second is as costly as the first.
The first is false comfort. An advertisement can be written entirely in permitted words and still indicate a preference. The photographs chosen, the placement of the advertisement, and what the copy says about the surrounding area rather than about the property can each do it. The regulation reaches all three.3
The second is false alarm, and it is the mirror image of over-reading a marketing claim. Ordinary descriptive language gets struck from listings by people applying a remembered list, and the property is described worse for no legal gain. Nothing in section 3604(c) or in the current regulation names individual words.23
The operative question is not whether a phrase appears on somebody's list. It is whether the advertisement, read whole, indicates a preference or a limitation based on a protected characteristic. That is a harder question than a word search, and it is the one the statute actually asks.
What an editor can check, and what a lawyer decides
An editor working on property copy can do four things, each of which produces evidence rather than an opinion. None of the four calls for a judgment about the law.
The first is an inventory: every descriptive phrase in the listing that refers to people rather than to the property, gathered in one place so they can be read together. The second is a consistency check across a portfolio, since a firm advertising forty properties in four different registers has a pattern that no single listing reveals. The third is a check that the property itself, rather than the neighborhood's residents, is what the copy describes. The fourth is flagging language that has more than one reading, which is copy editing work as Editors Canada defines it, covering correctness, consistency, and completeness.4
Whether a particular advertisement violates the Fair Housing Act is not an editorial question, and EditFast does not answer it. Everything a client sends is treated in confidence, including listings, portfolios, and correspondence.
We work on real estate and property copy at the level of wording, consistency, and clarity, and we report what reads two ways. Where a phrase raises a compliance question, that question belongs with the firm's own counsel or its broker of record.
The one thing worth changing today
Any firm relying on a photocopied word list is relying on a document that stopped being a regulation thirty years ago, and that never named the thing the statute actually prohibits. Replacing it with the text of section 3604(c) and 24 CFR 100.75, both of which run to a page, costs an afternoon and gives every writer in the office the actual standard.