Real estate brokers and agents with a typical residential listing agreement for the sale of a property are not required by law to respond to census enumerator's questions about the occupants of such property. That's the conclusion of NAR consultations with the U.S. Census Bureau. NAR has heard from a growing number of residential brokers and agents that census workers, in some cases, were aggressively seeking information about the occupants of homes among their listings. Some census workers claimed that the law requires brokers and agents to respond to such inquiries. In fact, Census Bureau officials acknowledge that the law does not generally apply to the "ordinary" case of a residential real estate broker or agent taking an exclusive listing for a residential property and marketing that property in the variety of ways that real estate professionals commonly do. A full explanation and advice for handling census inquiries is included in an NAR legal advisory.

NAR Legal Advisory