Welcome back to the Digible Dudes podcast. In today’s episode, we have Kyla Mittal once again as our special guest. Kyla is a housing specialist for a non-profit organization that focuses on affordable housing. Throughout the episode, we talk about Kyla’s work in secret shopping for fair housing.

Kyla gets into the conversation, describing what exactly she does when she’s secret shopping and the process of inquiring about apartments. She also talks about how the pandemic affected her work and the process of prospecting through phone calls. She talks about how she sometimes has to pretend to be someone else in order to find if there are any discriminations going on.

Kyla continues her conversation, explaining her role as a data collector and how she manages to ask and find information about the complaints and record what they say in a legal way. Further down in the conversation, Kyla answers Reid’s question about discrimination and comparison when doing fair housing.

In the next section, she talks about the property visiting timeline and how certain parts of the process occur in the first 48 hours of secret shopping. Diving into the verification of discrimination, Kyla shared how she involves in the incident as the data collector and what happens after she has done her part and filed the report.

Kyla then shares her experience of doing property visiting and involving clients, which made her nervous initially in fear of forgetting to ask questions and the details about the specific person or incident.

In the next section of the episode, Kyla shares some of the challenges she has to face while being a data collector in the fair housing industry and what measures she takes to do her job as unbiased as possible. Wrapping up the conversation, Kyla shares what motivates her to keep working in fair housing as her career.

[06.31] Secret Shopping as a Side Gig – Kyla talks about her process of contacting and inquiring about apartments.

[09.23] Questions – Most common things apartment managers want to know about potential tenants when inquiring about an apartment.

[12.53] The Role of a Data Collector – How Kyla observe subtle discriminations when shopping for apartments.

[17.07] Discrimination – Kyla gets into the details of what kind of discrimination happens in the industry and measures she takes to evaluate the situation and get proof of discrimination.

[19.23] Reporting – The process of reporting discrimination and measures that are taken to make sure that the testers remain as unbiased as possible.

[26.02] Challenges in Fair housing – Kyla’s unique side hustle can get a bit tricky, sometimes due to numerous reasons. She explains what challenges she faces and what measures she takes to overcome them.

[29.36] Motivation – Why motivates Kyla to continue her work and why she enjoys her work in fair housing.