Buyers are still doing it: tucking a handwritten note into a purchase offer, describing the nursery they’d paint or the porch where they’d host holidays, hoping a stranger reading it will pick their bid over a higher one. Real estate agents call these buyer “love letters,” and the practice has quietly persisted even as the industry’s own trade groups and at least one state’s licensing regulator have spent roughly five years telling agents to stop passing them along. California’s real estate regulator flagged the risk in an official bulletin, Oregon briefly banned the practice outright in 2021, and the National Association of Realtors has repeatedly told members the letters can expose sellers to discrimination claims. Buyers keep writing them anyway, because in a competitive market a warm story can feel like the only lever left to pull.
Why the letters keep landing on sellers’ desks
The appeal is obvious to anyone who has lost a bidding war on price alone: a letter is free, and it lets a buyer plead their case directly instead of through numbers on a spreadsheet. What those letters tend to contain, according to NAR’s own guidance to agents, is the trouble. Alexia Smokler, the association’s fair housing director, has explained that if the letter reveals the buyer’s race, religion, national origin or other protected category, a seller who chooses that buyer can end up on the wrong side of federal fair housing law even for entirely unrelated reasons, according to NAR’s own reporting for agents. A letter describing a family’s Christmas traditions reveals religion. One mentioning a disability, a same-sex spouse, or a house of worship the family attends does the same for other protected classes. NAR’s Charlie Lee, the association’s senior counsel, has also warned that some buyers have escalated well past a simple note, assembling what he called “sophisticated packages that include photographs and videos,” material that can make a buyer’s race, family structure, or religion even harder for a seller to unsee once it has been read.
Where regulators have actually drawn a line
This isn’t only trade-group caution. California’s Department of Real Estate, the state agency that licenses and disciplines agents, addressed the practice directly in an official bulletin, warning that because a love letter “might also include details about a person’s race, religion, sexual orientation, etc.,” it “open[s] the door to unconscious bias and/or discrimination” when a seller weighs offers, according to the California DRE’s own bulletin. The same bulletin notes that the California Association of Realtors has gone further, suggesting listing agents state upfront in the MLS that buyer letters won’t even be presented to sellers. Oregon took the most direct regulatory swing: in 2021 it became the first state to pass a law requiring listing agents to reject buyer love letters outright. A federal court blocked enforcement of that law in 2022 on First Amendment grounds, and it remains unenforced today, according to Oregon Realtors’ current risk-management guidance to its own members. That guidance still tells agents to focus “strictly on objective offer terms and financial qualifications” and to avoid discussing anything personal that isn’t tied to the transaction, advice that functions as a soft ban even without a law behind it.
Agents are building the workaround into their listings
Brokerages have started writing the rejection into their marketing rather than leaving it to chance. In the San Francisco Bay Area, agents including Alexander Lurie, Jodi Nishimura, Colin Halliday, and Sheila Mofrad now explicitly decline to accept buyer letters or photos as part of an offer, a shift recent reporting ties back to California Association of Realtors guidance issued roughly five years ago. Some buyers have adapted rather than given up the instinct entirely, passing personal details to a listing agent verbally instead of on paper, or leaning on smaller signals, like a number chosen for its personal significance, to make an offer feel less anonymous. The DRE bulletin’s underlying point still applies to those workarounds: dropping the paper trail can make a discrimination claim harder to prove, but it doesn’t change whether the underlying decision was legal.
NAR’s own recommendation to agents is blunter than any workaround: don’t deliver the letters at all, and say so upfront so buyers stop writing them expecting a seller will ever read them. Steer that buyer toward a stronger financial package or a larger earnest money deposit instead, something a seller can actually compare against a rival offer. Behind the scenes, agents are told to document the objective reasons a seller picked the winning bid, so there’s a defensible paper trail if a rejected buyer ever alleges bias.
The gap between the rule and the habit
None of this guidance has fully killed the practice, and it likely won’t as long as bidding wars reward buyers for standing out. What’s changed is who’s willing to pass the letter along. A growing number of listing agents now function as a filter between an emotional buyer and a seller who was never supposed to see the letter in the first place, and the industry’s own regulators and counsel are the ones who decided that filter needed to exist.
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