Short answer: there is no official HUD list of banned words. The famous fair housing advertising word and phrase list comes from a 1989 HUD guidance memo that was withdrawn in the 1990s and never replaced, and HUD's advertising regulation at 24 CFR Part 109 was rescinded. What still binds is the statute itself, Section 804(c) of the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits any published statement about the sale or rental of a dwelling that indicates a preference, limitation, or discrimination based on a protected class. The working test is simpler than any list: describe the dwelling, not the person you want living in it.
That distinction matters more every year, because real estate marketing has moved from written listing copy into video, and video is where a word list stops being useful. You can run a listing description through a filter. You cannot filter a person talking to a camera for ninety seconds about who would love this neighborhood. This is a practical guide to the rules that reach real estate video ads, written for the person briefing the content rather than the person defending it later. It is not legal advice, and state rules vary, so run your final language past your broker or counsel.
Is there an official fair housing advertising word and phrase list?
No, and this surprises most people who have been handed one in training. The list that circulates through MLS boards, brokerages, and compliance decks traces back to a single 1989 HUD memo issued under Section 804(c). HUD withdrew that memo during a regulatory cleanup in the 1990s and published nothing to replace it. Part 109, the fair housing advertising regulation, was rescinded as well.
The list survives because it is convenient, and it is genuinely a useful starting point. Words like "restricted," "exclusive," "adults only," and "no children" appear on it for good reason, and using them will still get you in trouble. But the list is not authoritative, it is not complete, and treating it as the whole compliance program creates a specific failure mode: teams start believing that language not on the list is automatically safe. It is not. The statute reaches the impression the advertisement creates, not a vocabulary.
Two consequences follow. First, you can violate 804(c) using words nobody ever put on a list. Second, plenty of terms on the old list are fine in context. "Master bedroom," "family room," "mother-in-law suite," and "walk to schools" describe architecture and geography, and describing the property is exactly what you are supposed to be doing.
What does the Fair Housing Act actually prohibit in advertising?
Section 804(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 preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, sex, disability, or familial status. Many states and cities add protected classes on top of that, commonly source of income, age, marital status, and sexual orientation, which is why a phrase that passes in one market can fail in another.
The reliable test in practice is a single question. Does this sentence describe the dwelling, or does it describe the person I imagine living there?
| What the line does | Example | Why it lands where it does |
|---|---|---|
| Describes the dwelling | "Two bedrooms, second floor walkup, no elevator" | A fact about the property. Even an unflattering one is fine, and often better |
| Describes the location | "Ten minutes from the interstate, two blocks to the park" | Geography is neutral and useful |
| Describes required conduct | "Non-smoking building, no pets" | A rule that applies to everyone, not a preference about who applies |
| Describes the resident | "Perfect for a young family," "ideal for young professionals" | Familial status and, in effect, age. This is the most common violation in video |
| Describes the community | "A great Christian neighborhood," "quiet adult building" | Religion and familial status stated as a selling point |
| Implies an audience visually | Casting that shows only one demographic across a whole campaign | The statute reaches photographs, illustrations, and symbols, not just words |
That last row is the one video teams underestimate. Section 804(c) explicitly reaches images and symbols, not only text, so the people you cast across a campaign are part of the message. A single video is rarely the problem. A library of twenty that shows one kind of household is a pattern, and patterns are what enforcement looks at.
Targeting is now part of the same conversation. HUD's 2024 guidance on advertising through digital platforms addressed the use of audience categorization tools in housing ads, and the concern is straightforward: if a targeting setup shows different housing content to different groups along protected characteristics, the outcome can amount to steering regardless of what the creative says. Clean creative delivered through a discriminatory audience setup is still a problem.
Why is video harder to keep compliant than a listing description?
Because the risky sentence is usually improvised, and it usually comes from a genuine attempt to be helpful. A creator standing in a three-bedroom colonial who says "honestly, this is such a great house for a family with kids" is not being malicious. They are being warm, and they have just made a familial status statement in an advertisement for a dwelling.
Written copy passes through a keyboard, a review, and often a compliance step. Video frequently does not. It gets filmed, cut, and pushed into an ad account inside a week, and the review that does happen is usually about pacing and brand look rather than about a phrase at the 0:47 mark. Three structural things make it harder:
The speech is unscripted. The whole appeal of creator-style video is that it does not sound written. That is also why the words are not pre-approved.
Nobody re-reads a video. A listing description gets scanned by several people. A ninety second clip gets watched once, for vibe.
Compliance sits after production. By the time anyone catches the line, the shoot is finished and the choice is to pay again or run it and hope. That pressure resolves the wrong way more often than teams like to admit.
The fix is not more review. It is moving the constraint to the front, into the brief, where it costs nothing. Scripted claims, an explicit out-of-scope list, and a short approval step before anything is boosted will catch more than a reviewer watching finished cuts. Brokerages that run this well also treat it as a training problem rather than a policing problem, and give agents and marketing staff a short refresher course everyone actually completes instead of a policy PDF nobody opens.
What other advertising rules apply to real estate video?
Fair housing is the one with the sharpest teeth, but it is not alone. A real estate video ad typically sits inside four separate rulebooks at once, and they have different authors, different enforcers, and different remedies.
| Rule | What it requires | What it means on a shoot |
|---|---|---|
| Fair Housing Act, Section 804(c) | No published statement indicating a preference, limitation, or discrimination based on a protected class, in words or images | Script the claims and list what is out of scope |
| State real estate license law | Most states require the brokerage name in every advertisement, often more prominent than the agent or team name; some also require the license number to be accessible | Make brokerage identification a named deliverable, spoken or on screen |
| NAR Code of Ethics, Article 12 and Standard of Practice 12-1 | Present a true picture in advertising, and ensure altered images are not misleading and that the alteration is disclosed | Disclose virtual staging or any generated interior on or beside the image |
| FTC Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule | In effect since October 21, 2024. Bans fake and AI-generated testimonials that misrepresent the identity or experience of the person giving them. Penalties run up to $53,088 per violation | A client testimonial has to come from an actual client |
The brokerage identification requirement is the one that quietly breaks the most campaigns, because it is easy to satisfy at the point of filming and expensive to satisfy afterward. Adding a spoken introduction or a persistent watermark during production costs a sentence. Retrofitting it across forty delivered clips costs an editing pass on all forty.
Can you use AI-generated video in real estate advertising?
For some things, comfortably. For the two things AI video tools most want to sell real estate teams, no.
AI is genuinely good at the production layer: cutting, captioning, resizing to vertical and square, drafting a script you then approve, and assembling a listing flythrough from photos you already own and have the rights to. None of that misrepresents anything, and if your need is a fast walkthrough from existing assets, an AI tool will beat commissioning a person on both cost and speed. Use one.
The two risky uses are specific. A synthetic person delivering a client testimonial runs directly into the FTC rule, which reaches testimonials that misrepresent the identity or experience of the person giving them, and a generated spokesperson describing a transaction that never happened is squarely inside that description. A generated depiction of a property runs into the true-picture standard, and it needs a clear disclosure on or beside the image rather than a line in the footer. We go deeper into the testimonial side in our guide to AI-generated testimonials and the law.
There is also a plain marketing argument underneath the legal one. Housing is a high-consideration purchase where the audience is already suspicious, and the format works precisely because it looks like a real person in a real place. A synthetic presenter gives up the only advantage the format has.
What should a real estate video brief include?
Everything above collapses into a handful of lines you write once and reuse. The goal is that a creator can film confidently without guessing where the edges are.
| Brief section | What to specify |
|---|---|
| Approved claims | The property facts, features, and location details you have verified and will stand behind |
| Out of scope | No commentary on who the home suits, on schools by quality, on crime, or on the character of the residents |
| Identification | The exact brokerage name and how it must appear, spoken, on screen, or both |
| Disclosures | Staging or alteration disclosure, plus FTC disclosure for paid content |
| Casting | Who appears across the campaign, reviewed as a set rather than one video at a time |
| Licensing | Channels, term, and territory, agreed before filming rather than after delivery |
| Approval | A named person who signs off before anything is boosted |
Two notes on the last two rows. Licensing is not a compliance issue but it fails just as often: if the license does not cover paid distribution, you have commissioned an organic post rather than an ad, which is what our page on UGC usage rights walks through. And the approval row should name a person, not a committee. Programs stall when the reviewer is a group, because nobody owns the decision and everything waits.
None of this is heavy. It is one page, written once, attached to every brief. The teams that get real estate video wrong almost never do so because the rules were unclear. They do it because nobody wrote the rules down before the camera was already rolling, and by then the only options left were expensive. If you want the format-by-format view of what to commission and how the briefing works in practice, our page on real estate UGC covers it, and hiring a real, verifiable person for the shoot, rather than a synthetic presenter, is what removes the testimonial question entirely.
See how UGCMarketplace works for your kind of brand on the use cases page.
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