Multifamily Marketing’s Legal Landscape
From Fair Housing to fee transparency to AI, there are many regulations to juggle.
Multifamily marketers face a complicated regulatory landscape when planning promotions and campaigns, and new laws seem to pop up by the month. Whether at the local, state or federal level, it can be hard to stay abreast of all the policies dictating how to attract new residents.
From Fair Housing compliance to recent developments in fee transparency and lingering questions about artificial intelligence use, the legal marketing environment is constantly changing. It is important to stay compliant and know how to avoid the most common headache-inducing mistakes.
Fair Housing in the digital realm
The most prominent regulations that multifamily marketers face come in the form of federal Fair Housing laws, which were established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
“Multifamily is such a unique industry, in that we have these federal Fair Housing guidelines that we have to stay within,” said Christine Gustafson, vice president of marketing and public relations at The Breeden Co. “And that is when you’re working with both residents and prospects.”
Since digital marketing has become the first place a prospect engages with a property, legal compliance must start at the top of the funnel. A 2024 National Multifamily Housing Council survey found that 79 percent of respondents reported visiting a property website, 75 percent said they checked an ILS and 71 percent said they read a property’s online reviews.
The easiest compliance box to check is to make sure your web pages and advertising materials include the Equal Housing Opportunity logo and the International Symbol of Accessibility.
Beyond that, Fair Housing advertising materials cannot tie messaging to certain protected classes. At the federal level, these include race, religion, sex (including gender identity and sexual orientation), national origin, disability or familial status. States and localities may have even stricter provisions.
Home in on what you can identify and base your targeting around that.
—Shelly Steitz, Senior Consultant Partner, Cadence Marketing Solutions
It can be easy for a marketer to inadvertently target a protected class or exclude certain groups in marketing materials, observed Shelly Steitz, a senior consultant partner at Cadence Marketing Solutions.
“Instead of saying something like, ‘We have a lot of young people who live here,’ highlight the community events and how you’re bringing your residents together,” she shared.
Another common marketing tactic that can prove troublesome is the use of photos of only one person, according to Gustafson.
“You should have a group of adults,” she added. “You can’t have a photo of just one person of one race and one sex. It should be a group, to show cohesiveness.”
The temptation of targeting
One of the main draws of digital advertising is that it allows marketers to target their content to hyper-specific demographics. While this might be the perfect way to help Lululemon sell a pair of leggings, commonly targeted demographics—age, sex, etc.—are protected classes under Fair Housing laws.
But there are other methods of digital targeting that avoid using protected classes, Steitz pointed out. For example, marketers can identify people who have recently visited an ILS page or searched on Google for information about a certain neighborhood.
“Home in on what you can identify and base your targeting around that,” she recommended.
Being transparent with your listings
Another burgeoning regulation impacting marketers is fee transparency. State and local governments, along with the Federal Trade Commission, have been increasingly targeting operators over fee disclosures.
In December 2025, Greystar reached a settlement with the FTC and the state of Colorado regarding the firm’s pricing transparency practices. While the settlement did not include an admission of wrongdoing, the FTC confirmed in the agreement that federal law requires disclosing all mandatory fees when advertising rent.
A challenge, according to Steitz, is that many ILS websites were not designed with fee transparency in mind, which could make compliance difficult in some cases.
“When we’re putting something into our property management system and it gets pushed out to our ILS platforms, it doesn’t always push out in the way that a regulation might require us to do it,” she said.
Marketers must now work with the providers of their property websites and their ILS pages to make sure that rent prices and fees are displayed consistently, which can be a challenging catch-up game.
One action Steitz recommends to make the process less painful is standardizing fees across a firm’s entire portfolio, which makes coordinating pricing across platforms easier.
Make sure you put in the effort, so that you can take responsibility for what you send out or what’s communicated on your behalf.
—Raul Gastesi, Partner, Gastesi, Lopez, Mestre & Cobiella
Responsible AI use in marketing
And, of course, there’s AI.
While the technology has the potential to dramatically reshape workflows, experts caution against relying too heavily on AI tools while the products are still in their early stages.
Raul Gastesi, a partner at the Miami law firm Gastesi, Lopez, Mestre & Cobiella, said he was skeptical of AI tools that communicate with prospects and answer questions, because you give up some control over what the bot may say. The key is quality control.
Gastesi advises landlords and owns multifamily property himself. “Make sure you put in the effort, so that you can take responsibility for what you send out or what’s communicated on your behalf,” he noted.
More and more properties are turning to these agentic AI tools, and proponents argue that having a bot communicate with prospects could actually improve legal compliance, because you are able to program more consistent responses—provided that the appropriate safeguards are engineered beforehand.
And from a content creation perspective, Gustafson said that while it can be tempting to quickly whip up art and copy using ChatGPT, marketers must still carefully review all materials for legal compliance.
“I’m not a proponent of AI yet,” Gustafson said. “I think it’s still in its infancy and hasn’t evolved yet in our market to be able to accurately push out communication that would keep us protected.”
