Idaho real estate agent offers free listings to liberals leaving the state. Is that allowed?
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Sarah Cutler, Idaho Statesman
(Idaho Statesman) — The posts on Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter, made a splash: A real estate firm in Eagle was offering free real estate listings to liberals leaving Idaho.
“We are here to help you return to your safe spaces!” said its posts, which included a picture of a couple wearing disposable face masks.
The firm, Idaho Wild, got a range of responses — “everything from people in full support and throwing in additional offers … all the way to people lecturing me about being, whatever, hateful and un-Christian,” Mark Fitzpatrick, the company’s owner, told the Idaho Statesman by phone. Fitzpatrick, a retired police officer from California, also owns the Old State Saloon, an Eagle bar that has drawn attention for its politics.
As of Tuesday, no one had taken Fitzpatrick up on his offer. Still, some asked: Was this kind of real estate advertisement even allowed?
The short answer, according to industry groups and regulators, is yes.
Firm’s ad violates no laws
The federal Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination because of national origin, religion or sex, among other “protected classes.” But political affiliation doesn’t count as a protected group under that law.
The post doesn’t violate any Idaho real estate laws, either, said Bob McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Division of Occupational and Professional Licenses, which serves Idaho’s Real Estate Commission.
Promotions like Fitzpatrick’s, though, can present a slippery slope toward violations of federal law, said Zoe Ann Olson, the executive director of the Intermountain Fair Housing Council. The language and graphics used can appear as “proxies” for discrimination against protected groups, she said. This can play out in subsequent interactions between a real estate agent and a prospective buyer or seller.
“Whatever term that people have a stigma around, or have … bias toward, with further action and sometimes further statements, you know exactly what they mean,” she told the Statesman in a phone interview.
Fitzpatrick said that wasn’t his intent — that he wants “to live by people who have … biblical morals and ethics,” but that “those people can … be made up of all races and religions and sexes and genders.” His posts were intended to be lighthearted, he said, but they stemmed from his concern about liberal politics.
“There’s no discrimination here. This is about people who have just gone to the extreme as far as their beliefs, and they’ve just become wicked,” he said. “The liberalism of today is not the liberalism of decades past. I’ve gotten to the point where … I don’t want that around. I don’t want liberalism around my family. I don’t want it around my community.”
Over 90% of his clients are California conservatives
Fitzpatrick estimates that over 90% of his clients in recent years have been conservatives moving from California to Idaho.
He said he thought his recent post was “pretty out there, pretty blunt,” but was still in line with his previous messaging. In the comments of his recent post, he said he would offer conservative clients moving to the state a free AR-15.
He often posts videos on social media of himself going shooting with his family.
His Old State Saloon hosted a “Hetero Awesome Fest” event as a foil to Boise Pride Festival. The saloon posted on X offering to adopt the babies of any readers considering an abortion, and advertised a singles night “only for Trump voters.” It has cross-posted Idaho Wild’s ad on X, offering to “throw in an additional $1000 cash and a case of masks if it is a family from Eagle, specifically!”
“People would go to my website and they would see, literally, we explain our beliefs on there: that we are constitutional conservatives; we believe in God, the creator; and (we love) the wonderful things that are in Idaho that God provided for us,” he said.
Some agents use ‘patriots,’ ‘freedom’ in marketing
He’d seen other Idaho real estate agents take a similar tack, avoiding explicit statements of their politics but attracting certain kinds of customers based on more subtle marketing, he said.
“I think other ones are clear in the way that they present themselves as being ‘patriots’ ” or use the word “freedom” in their marketing, he said. “It’s not really being so direct” as using the words “liberal” or “conservative,” he said, “but it’s guiding people that direction.”
Real estate is a relationship-based business, which means many clients often already have a sense of their real estate agent’s politics — or they find out as they work together, said Elizabeth Hume, the president of Boise Regional Realtors, the largest Realtor association in Idaho.
In real estate, “you often work with people you know, like and trust,” she told the Statesman. “I would surmise that many people know how their agent (votes) … but they may already know that information without (the agent) having to advertise.”
Fitzpatrick’s post is “not an outlier” in Idaho, Olson said. Her organization has received a heads-up in several cases where one real estate agent flagged another’s post to the Intermountain Fair Housing Council. She said she was concerned by any case in which agents were “facilitating a particular bias.”
“It’s like we’re resegregating ourselves, and that’s what concerns me,” she said.
65% of voters moving to Idaho are Republican
In 2023, 65% of voters who moved to Idaho from out of state were registered Republicans, the Idaho Capital Sun reported late that year, based on a report from the Secretary of State’s office, which tracks the voter registrations and former home states of new Idaho residents.
Fitzpatrick’s post reflected a national trend: In 2022, NPR reported that, driven in part by political polarization around COVID-19 measures, people were “purposely moving to places reflecting their views.”
“Red zip codes are getting redder and blue zip codes are getting bluer,” the outlet found, which was leading both left- and right-leaning havens toward groupthink and more extreme views.
Boise Regional Realtors “doesn’t have a stance” on whether this kind of political division in real estate is good or bad, Hume said.
“If it was something else with fair housing, we definitely do have an opinion about that — you know, race, religion, family status, all of those other things,” she told the Statesman by phone. “As far as having a diverse neighborhood with regards to fair housing, we are absolutely wanting that diverse neighborhood. We want to see a lot of thoughts and a lot of flavors.”
“But with political party, it’s not regulated, and it’s not considered a fair housing issue,” she said. “So we don’t really have an opinion about that.”