That Couch Is Comfortable

How do you get off the couch and start your house hunt? Sure, you can spend your evenings watching others find their dream homes on reality television, but won’t get you any closer than you will treating Zillow like a porn channel. What you need is clarity.

They say charity starts at home, but clarity doesn’t. You’ll only get clarity about what is important to have in your next home either from perspective or information. Only when you have a better handle on these two will you find the motivation and inspiration to get off the couch.

A good way to gain perspective? Leaving home and going on vacation. When you step outside of your regular world, you will likely discover what you’re doing or how you’re doing it needs to change. Maybe you need a bigger place. Maybe you’ve stuffed your family of four into a one-bedroom apartment. Maybe your living room has become a jungle gym. Maybe it’s time to move, and you just realized it by leaving, and coming back.

Information, on the other hand, won’t come to you on a lounge chair as you sip your margarita poolside. You’ll have to go out and find it.

But that’s crazy, you say. In our information age, when more is at our fingertips than ever before, we can learn everything there is to know about what’s available online, and all there is about the entire process.

Alas, there remains an information gap for many homebuyers. Diana Vasquez, New Jersey Realtor® and founder of the Spanish-language real estate education portal La Chapulina Verde, believes the only reason that the Hispanic community does not already represent an even bigger piece of the buyer pie is due to a combination of information scarcity and information overload. I’ll explain.

Information Scarcity

Nearly one in five homebuyers in the United States last year speaks Spanish as their first language. By 2030, some estimate that 56% of all new homeowners will be Hispanic-American. Some have said that 25% of all real estate transactions are already negotiated entirely in Spanish. So, the sales are happening at a big scale, but are these buyers getting what they need? I am not sure.

Housing Wire recently wrote that:

Mortgage loan applications, their terminology, and substantial documentation and information requirements pose challenges to native Spanish speakers in the early stages of home buying. In fact, limited English proficiency (LEP) is one of the most significant barriers to homeownership among Hispanic Americans, second only to credit score challenges.

You don’t have to look too far back in time to see that the “Liar loans” of the Great Recession, which accounted for upwards of 70% of the busted loans, included a great deal of lending to buyers who simply didn’t understand what they were getting into.

Some are already resorting to AI to act as translators in their homebuying journey. Will that be enough?

Vasquez created her platform because the steps of the real estate transaction, along with the means of finding good agents, are literally getting lost in translation.

Information Overload

On the other hand, Spanish-speaking buyers, however, are just like everyone else. They worry. They get stressed out. And there’s a lot of information out there which can easily overwhelm even the most savvy buyers. What’s getting lost is more figurative than literal.

Let’s zoom into what happens for many people. What if you will be the first person in your family to buy a home? And what if your comfort level is in a language that wasn’t English? How mistrustful would you be? That’s not an information gap. That’s a gap in trust.

Learn all you want, in any language. We’re all inundated by data. We can see what our neighbors paid for their homes, and we can tour around their closets, too. What do we get from that? Jealousy, perhaps, or worse. The market is constantly shifting. Pundits talking about mortgage rates will not help you zoom in on what’s important to you. There’s got to be a better way.

You see, homebuying is rarely about knowing everything about the transaction, but feeling confident that you have a trusted team that can make it happen. Oh, and being able to communicate what you need in the process.

That’s why you need real estate agents. And not just Spanish-speaking agents, but good agents of any stripe who take the time to explain everything and who speak your house language. Maybe you need more data. Maybe you need the basics. But you need to partner with someone who cares about you and around whom you feel comfortable enough to ask the “dumb questions.”

During Hispanic Heritage Month, we can work towards making the homebuying process accessible for everyone. That may start with bridging the language barrier. But it will hardly end there.

Information is power. Delivered effectively, it will help everyone get off the couch and into their next home.

To learn more, be in touch! And to take it a step further, pre-order my book on navigating the homebuying process, The Pursuit of Home: A Real Estate Guide to Achieving the American Dream, coming out October 14th!