Anti-Jewish slurs used in online real estate listings

Real estate agent Jazz Samra says a third-party company prepared and posted the ads.

TORONTO — A real estate agent whose name and company were listed at the bottom of several online ads with the taglines “You don’t have to be Jewish to buy this house” and “You don’t have to be Jewish to rent this house” said they were put up by a third-party company and he had no knowledge the slogans had been used.

Jazz Samra, a sales representative at Homexperts Real Estate Inc. in Brampton, told The CJN he does not endorse the ads, which include listings for three separate Brampton homes for sale and one Mississauaga home for rent on the online classified sites Craigslist, Kijiji, Trovit and Mitula.

“I don’t review every ad,” Samra said. “I’ve never seen these before… I will make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

All of the ads appear to have been posted between late February and mid-March.

In a follow-up phone call with The CJN, Samra said he deleted the ads with the offensive slogans.

Although the ads appeared to have been removed from Kijiji, The CJN was subsequently able to find them on Trovit and Mitula, where they remained as of March 13. On Craigslist, the wording had been changed to “You don’t have to be rich to buy this house.”

The CJN was notified of the listings by a house-hunter who had seen two of the ads on Kijiji.

Samra said that two or three years ago, a company called “Coefficients” contacted him to offer their ad-posting services, and he took them up on it.

They have helped him post “thousands of ads over the years,” he said.

“Every week, I give them 100 or 150 homes for sale and they take the information and post ads… Sometimes, the people that post them are overseas, in India, Pakistan, the Philippines or Russia.”

He noted that he has contacted the company “to see why they did it” and, “if something is wrong there, then for sure I won’t work with them anymore.”

Homexpert’s president and CEO, Moninder Khudal, told The CJN he also had no prior knowledge of the ads and was “extremely, extremely sorry on behalf of my company to all the people who were hurt by this.”

He said he put in a complaint to the third-party company and is determined to “get to the bottom of it – who the company is, what happened and how,” in order to take actions accordingly.

Khudal said he always gives final approval to ads his sales representatives place in publications such as newspapers and magazines, but that it’s difficult to monitor everything that is posted on sites such as Craigslist and Kijiji.

“This should not have happened,” he stressed. “And in future, we’ll make sure it won’t happen again.”

In a March 13 email to Samra from Mary Rose Somera-Cadiente, the Philippines-based managing director of Coefficients, said she “would like to apologize on behalf of Coefficients team about the ‘accused racist ad titles’ that were created by my team. We do not in any way intend to speak ill about Jewish people or create an impression through those ad titles that GTA Homexperts is racist. We do not have anything against Jewish people and in fact, a number of our clients are Jewish, and we love dealing with them.”

She blamed the ads on a new hire.

“I conducted a meeting with my team this morning and I found out that the employee who specifically used that ad title is our newest employee who is still undergoing training. I admit that it is a mistake on our part, as this person is still not yet exposed with so much cultural differences and some terms and phrases that might demean other people. She said that she does not in any way meant to offend our Jewish folks and she honestly thinks that the term ‘Jewish’ means rich people in general. In the ad title that she used, she meant to express there that not only the ‘rich’ people can rent a home as luxurious as the property being advertised.” She is deeply apologizing about it most especially to our Jewish friends.”

She added: “Rest assured that this will not happen in the future… we are responsible for this and… GTA Homexperts has nothing to do with this mistake.”

Kristina Wilson, a spokesperson for the Real Estate Council of Ontario (RECO), which regulates agents in the province, said she couldn’t comment on specific cases for confidentiality reasons. But she added that all agents must adhere to a code of ethics, which says they “are to refrain from any behaviour that could be reasonably regarded as disgraceful, dishonourable, unprofessional or unbecoming. This could include creating advertisements with potentially offensive content. The type of situation you have identified is very uncommon, but when it does happen, we take it seriously. We will usually try to educate and work with the registrant to affect change swiftly, but on occasion, we have had to escalate matters to our discipline process.”