Are your future neighbours old or young? Belgian or foreign? A new property website, Realo, offers to draw up a profile of your future neighbours, the Het Laaste Nieuws said on Wednesday. The Centre for Equal Opportunities strongly disapproves, as they say it encourages discrimination. Realo attributes a “social profile” to each neighbourhood, to give potential buyers an idea of what their future neighbours are like. The idea comes from the United States. But the Centre for Equal Opportunities thinks this new platform encourages discrimination. ‘A Belgian landlord was convicted for saying that his apartment was in a building that didn’t let in immigrants”.
By drawing up a social profile of neighbourhoods, “the Realo site does the same thing, but in a different form”, says the director Patrick Charlier.
The website’s creators have said they are not breaking the law. “All our figures and statistics are official data that we have simply grouped together”, they said. “Being multicultural is just one criteria among many others”, they added.
(Source: Belga)
