If you are a real estate agent, one of the growing demographics is the Hispanic housing market. Recent reports from DataQuick have show the growth in housing purchases by those with Hispanic surnames has grown dramatically in the past few years. While I am not saying enroll in a Spanish language course tomorrow, recent signs on immigration policy point to a large group of previously illegal aliens being granted legal status. Once that occurs, the next step for many of them will be the entry into the housing market as buyers.

You do the math.

The number of Hispanics buying houses across the country is growing rapidly. DataQuick, a San Diego real estate information company, scoured public records from 2005 in 37 states and found 14.6 percent of all homebuyers had Hispanic surnames, compared with 10.3 percent five years earlier. “The one group of people that are continually buying homes is the Latino community,” said Migdalia Norat, a spokeswoman for the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals. “One out of every four homebuyers in the U.S. is Latino.”

At a time when the overall real estate market has grown sluggish, many in the real estate world are looking at the Hispanic home-buying market as a future source of growth. Nationally, the Hispanic home ownership rate has risen 21 percent in the past decade but still has room to grow, Norat said. Experts estimate that Hispanic homebuyers will represent 40 percent of first-time homebuyers by 2012.

Currently, 49 percent of Hispanics are homeowners — well below the national average of 72 percent, according to figures provided by the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame.  via THE NEWARK STAR-LEDGER

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