Fair Housing and Responsible AI Use

Our commitment

Burbia is committed to the principles of the Fair Housing Act (42 U.S.C. §§ 3601–3631) and its implementing regulations (24 C.F.R. Part 100). We do not recommend, steer, or exclude neighborhoods on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, disability, or any other class protected by federal, state, or local fair-housing law.

This commitment applies to every surface of the product: the AI chat experience, the scoring algorithm, town descriptions, marketing materials, and any communication between Burbia and its users or partners.

How recommendations work

Recommendations are generated from user-declared preferences: budget, commute tolerance, school ratings, housing type, walkability, yard size, and lifestyle priorities. The AI does not ask for, infer, or use information about a user's race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, sex, familial status, or disability to generate or rank results.

The system does not target or exclude neighborhoods based on protected characteristics, whether directly or through proxy variables. We recognize that certain data points — including school ratings, median home prices, and neighborhood descriptors — can correlate with race and national origin. To mitigate this risk, we maintain the following safeguards:

• Town data scanner.We maintain an automated scanner that runs against all town descriptions before publication, flagging language identified by HUD guidance as potentially steering — including racial or ethnic identifiers, exclusionary descriptors, and demographic characterizations. Flagged content is reviewed and remediated before deployment.
• System-prompt guardrails.The AI's instructions explicitly prohibit steering by demographics, crime statistics, or neighborhood composition. The AI is instructed to refuse requests that would violate fair-housing principles and to redirect to objective, verifiable data sources.
• Scoring transparency. Town scores are computed from publicly available, verifiable data (school ratings, tax rates, commute times, walk scores, median home prices). No demographic composition data enters the scoring function.

Prohibited use

Users and partners may not use Burbia to engage in discriminatory housing practices, including but not limited to:

• Screening, segmenting, or filtering buyers or neighborhoods by any protected class.
• Using AI outputs to steer buyers toward or away from neighborhoods based on the racial, ethnic, religious, or demographic composition of those neighborhoods.
• Discriminatory advertising, lead routing, or marketing targeting.
• Attempting to extract protected-class information about any neighborhood from the AI.
• Using Burbia outputs to evade fair-housing obligations under federal, state, or local law.

Burbia reserves the right to immediately suspend or terminate access for any use that violates this policy.

Monitoring, review, and enforcement

Burbia monitors AI outputs and partner activity for compliance with this policy. Suspected violations are investigated by Burbia and, where substantiated, result in corrective action — up to and including termination of partner access and reporting to the appropriate regulatory authority.

We review the AI's outputs and the underlying town data for unintended bias. As the product scales, we intend to conduct formal disparate-impact analysis of recommendation patterns and will publish findings in this section. Review findings are assessed by legal counsel and remediated before deployment.

AI transparency

The chat experience is powered by a large language model. It is software, not a human real-estate professional. AI output can be incomplete, inaccurate, or out of date. You should verify any material information — school boundaries, tax rates, commute times, pricing, zoning — with an authoritative source and a licensed professional before making a decision.

The AI does not make automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects about you. It does not determine creditworthiness, insurance eligibility, employment, housing applications, or government benefits. All real-world decisions remain yours.

Report a concern

If you believe Burbia's AI or any partner using Burbia has engaged in discriminatory conduct, please contact us immediately at compliance@burbia.ai. We investigate every report and respond within five business days.

You may also file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) at hud.gov or call 1-800-669-9777.