A leading estate agent advertised a property with the warning “no Pakis, Indians, Arabs and Philippines” after accidentally publishing an “internal comment” instead of the property description, it has admitted.

The comment described the landlord’s “restrictions” in respect to prospective tenants, a spokesperson for Alliance Real Estate said, stressing the company was obliged to enforce such restrictions.

But restricting housing or any other goods or services based on nationality or skin colour is illegal, according to a prominent human rights lawyer.

Apologising for the incident, the spokesperson said Alliance would change the wording of its internal comments to “kinder language”, adding no offence had been intended by its “colloquial tone”.

A listing for a three-bedroom apartment in Żebbuġ appeared on the Alliance Real Estate website on Friday afternoon, later appearing on property aggregate website propertymarket.com.mt.

Alongside a note explaining the property could be turned into a five-bedroom terraced house, the description also said: “no Pakis, Indians, Arabs and Philippines” (sic).

The term ‘Paki’ is a derogatory term for a person from Pakistan that has also been used to contemptuously describe persons of other South Asian nationalities.

The listing had been removed from propertymarket.com.mt by Sunday afternoon and the listing on the Alliance website was edited yesterday morning to remove the reference.

A spokesperson for Alliance said the description had appeared when an “internal comment” by the company had been published by mistake.

Some owners decide to restrict certain cultures, nationalities or ages of tenants, others may decide to restrict all pets or certain types of pets

“Unfortunately, the reality is that it is not uncommon for landlords to impose restrictions on the types of tenants they would accept living in their properties and we, obviously, have to abide by these specifications,” she said.

“Some owners decide to restrict certain cultures, nationalities or ages of tenants, others may decide to restrict all pets or certain types of pets.”

The spokesperson said that, in Alliance’s database, “we have an internal comments section where these specifications are listed so that property advisers do not need to check with the landlord every time.

“Unfortunately, what happened in this case was that the internal comments were incorrectly entered in the wrong place, and these were published on the advert instead of the actual description.”

She said the company had implemented a “stronger internal approval process” and changed the wording it used internally to “kinder language when it comes to this kind of restriction, even though this is not intended to be public”.

Neil Falzon, director of human rights NGO Aditus, said restricting access to housing based on nationality is against the law.

“Maltese law is crystal clear: anyone refusing to offer a service to a person simply on the basis of their skin colour, nationality or origin is breaking the law... the law requires you to treat people with decency and respect,” he said.

“Anyone seeing these ads should report them at once and the property owners should be punished and shamed,” he said, calling for more enforcement of equality legislation.

Propertymarket.com.mt distanced itself from the listing, saying the listings on its website reflected those on the websites of estate agents.

“Whatever is on their website appears on our site... we take these things seriously, but our website just replicates listings,” a spokesperson for the company said.

“We do review listings, but this one slipped through the net,” he said, stressing the property had been removed from the company’s website “within an hour” of appearing online.

Tenants of a Sliema apartment shared by around 40 foreign workers said in June last year that, though while they wanted to find alternative accommodation, “most people don’t rent to an Indian or someone from Bangladesh”.

They said such attitude restricted their choice of housing, often forcing them to rent cramped accommodation similar to the property in Sliema.

“Everywhere we go, we get shown apartments that look like this… lots of places like Qormi and Buġibba, the situation is the same.”