Real estate professionals can be the first line of defense for upholding fair housing laws and principles, and a new bill under debate in Massachusetts wants to ensure that agents know how to perform this job.
The current draft of the legislation, which has been backed by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors® (MAR), mandates that real estate license applicants must take 40 hours of classroom time; no less than four hours of that time must be dedicated to education on fair housing law. Existing brokers and agents seeking to renew their licenses must take at least two hours of classroom instruction on fair housing.
The bill also increases penalties for any professional violations of fair housing laws. An initial violation will bring a license suspension of 60 days. If the offender is found to have a previous fair housing violation within the last two years, the suspension is upped to 180 days (a doubling of the current maximum suspension time in Massachusetts, 90 days).
If the Massachusetts attorney general’s office or fair housing organizations discover evidence of fair housing violations, this bill permits them to directly refer the cases to the Massachusetts Board of Registration of Real Estate Brokers and Salespersons. Moreover, the Board of Registration would be required to publish an annual list of brokers or agents whose licenses were suspended due to fair housing violations, with an included summary of the violation and the response.
The bill has unanimously passed the Massachusetts Senate. It is currently being debated in the House, where it could face further amendments before/if it finally passes.
“MAR is in strong favor of this important legislation,” said the association in an emailed response to RISMedia. “Fair housing is such an important set of regulations and rules. MA’s regulations are more in-depth than the Department of Housing of Urban Development’s (HUD) and we are excited to ensure that real estate professionals have training before they get their license and then continue to get updates throughout their tenure.”
In February 2025, HUD (under new Secretary Scott Turner) terminated the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, which mandated HUD funding recipients work to actively eliminate housing segregation. The rule was first instituted by the Obama administration in 2015, discontinued by the first Trump administration and then reinstituted by the Biden administration in 2021. The removal of the rule was a matter of eliminating “red tape” and allowing localities more power in their decision-making, per Turner.
In a press release from the Massachusetts Senate, Senate President Karen Spilka (a Democrat) explicitly framed the legislation as a response to the Trump administration’s rolling back of fair housing enforcement from the national level.
“While the Trump Administration has sought to roll back protections, the Senate knows that our Commonwealth’s values demand that access to housing is guided by fairness and inclusion, not prejudice. Today we are taking an important step to make that promise real,” said Spilka.
The legislation is also a response to a 2020 study, co-published by the Boston Foundation and Suffolk University, that found housing discrimination remains an ongoing problem in the Boston area.
“We expected the numbers to be high, based on what we see in our work every day, but this is much more pervasive evidence of discrimination than any of us thought we would find,” said Jamie Langowski, assistant director of Suffolk University’s Housing Discrimination Testing Program (HDTP).
In 71% of the study’s tests, conducted from 2018 to 2019, Black participants acting as rental applicants faced housing discrimination, whether being shown less available apartments than white participants, not being able to make a showing appointment at all, not being offered financial incentives that white participants were, etc. The study also found that Black participants were much more likely to be “ghosted” by housing providers than white participants (92% of white participants would hear back, while only 62% of Black participants would).
