Easing the Way for Latinos to Buy Homes

The word escrow doesn't exist in Latin America. Neither do real estate agents.

So for Latino immigrants like Julio Arroyo, navigating California's complicated real estate market can be unendingly frustrating.

Arroyo, along with his sister and her husband, are looking for a three-bedroom, two-bath home, preferably with a guest house, in Pasadena or the San Fernando Valley. It's taken six months and two agents, and the three still haven't found anything that fits their $225,000 price range.

"They fired their other Realtor and canceled escrow after that Realtor bullied them into it," said Michael Baietti, an agent with Jim Dickson Realtors in Pasadena. "Some of that resulted from a language barrier; they never would have signed that document had they been sufficiently proficient in English."

Baietti, who speaks fluent Spanish, conducts business with Arroyo and Olga and Marcos Zegarra in their native tongue, and uses documents translated into Spanish by his firm. Arroyo and his sister are from Guatemala; Marcos Zegarra is from Peru.

The agent participates in a program designed by Jim Dickson Realtors for Latino home buyers. The 6-month-old effort is part of a growing push by real estate agents, lenders and others in the real estate industry to help Latinos become homeowners.

It's not just because it's the right thing to do. Targeting Latino home buyers is good business. Latinos are expected to make up half of California's population by 2020--making them the fastest-growing segment of the state's housing market.

Latino immigrants from 25 to 34 years old made up about 27% of new entrants to California's housing market in 2000, compared to non-Latino whites and American Indians, who represented only 8% of new entrants, according to a report by John Pitkin, president of Analysis & Forecasting Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based research firm.

That's not all. Immigrant home buyers in this age group--the peak age for first-time home buyers--will start to decline in the next 20 years, and American-born Latinos and other ethnic groups will begin to take their place, Pitkin said.

"The opportunity that's out there is tremendous," said Gary Acosta, chief executive of the National Assn. of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals. "The Hispanic community in this country and the proliferation of it in terms of numbers and buying power is like nothing we've seen since the baby boomer generation."