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  1. #1
    Senior Member Brian503a's Avatar
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    Housing Industry Awakens to the Latino Market

    http://users1.wsj.com

    Housing Industry Awakens to the Latino Market
    Home Builders Take Steps To Make Buying Easier For Hispanic Prospects

    By Ilan Brat
    The Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2005; Pg.B8



    FORT WORTH, Texas -- A full-size glass house complete with furniture sits inside the La Gran Plaza mall here, right next to the Cinema Latino and a Spanish-speaking income-tax preparer. Developers Andrew and Justin Segal are using the see-through house to target Hispanics daunted by the home-buying process.

    'The idea is that someone could walk in there who might not be the target of a new-house market, and everything is kind of there for them to see,' says Andrew Segal, whose company just began building homes for as little as $105,900 a few minutes' drive from the mall.

    Hispanics account for one in 10 households in the U.S., but until recently the housing industry gave them short shrift.

    No longer. Home builders are loosening their credit standards to accept Hispanic home buyers who don't have long credit histories or who depend upon multiple paychecks to pay the mortgage. They're building homes to house extended families. The Segal brothers' company, CasAlegria, is in the process of translating into Spanish all the documents needed to buy a home.

    In the first quarter, 49% of Hispanic families owned homes, up from 41% in 1994. Still, that is well below the 69% homeownership rate for the total U.S. population, and the housing industry is looking for Hispanic homeownership to keep rising.

    'The rabbit moving through the python in the housing industry is the growth of Latino and immigrant families,' says former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros, now chief executive of American CityVista, which targets low-income customers. Mr. Cisneros's firm has sold 2,050 homes since it partnered in 2000 with KB Home, one of the country's largest home builders.

    Strong demand for housing from immigrants of all nationalities is one reason why home prices have been rising so briskly in the U.S. Some of the fastest gains have come in communities like Los Angeles, Miami or New York that are beacons to immigrants from all over the world. The growing demand from first-time Hispanic home buyers, many of them with lower incomes, is pushing up home prices in once-decaying neighborhoods.

    Builders are making other changes to lure immigrants with large families. Griffin New Homes' 160-unit Coronado Square subdivision in Riverside, Calif. -- where up to 25% of home buyers are Hispanic -- offers houses that combine the living room and family room into one great room, perfect for family gatherings. Almost all of Montage Neighborhood Builders' homes in California include downstairs bedrooms and bathrooms for grandparents. Countrywide Home Loans Inc. started a program in 2004 that gives loans with no down payment to someone who can present a year's worth of utility bills, rent or even cable television payments. The program is well-suited for the Hispanic market, says Mary Salinas Duron, Countrywide executive vice president of national multicultural markets. 'Because they do business slightly differently, it doesn't mean their loan becomes riskier,' she says.

    Creative financing helped Rodolfo Castro and his family move into a new Dallas home in April. He'd wanted to move out of the house he was renting for some time, but he had no credit record. Then he showed a local lender two years of cellphone, utility, rent and cable payments and secured the financing for his new four-bedroom, $112,000 home in a Casas Modernas development in east Dallas. Now he owns the brick house on a street full of three- and four-bedroom homes shoehorned onto tiny lots.

    'It's for my children's better future,' says Mr. Castro as he stands by a newly planted tree in his front yard. 'I only had to get the money.'

    CasAlegria, the company with the glass house in the mall, is making its first home building push with 14 homes on approximately 7,000-square-foot lots in Forest Hill, a city of 13,000 near Fort Worth. CasaAlegria is trying to keep home prices down by excluding fireplaces and building the houses on inexpensive land farther back from a major thoroughfare. Still, even that puts the homes beyond the reach of many Mexican-Americans.

    Gustavo Angeles, who loads trucks for a food distributor, saw his credit application turned down recently by CasAlegria. His was the only income in the family, and his salary wasn't sufficient for the $105,900, four-bedroom home that he craved.

    'Sure, I could imagine myself in a house like that,' says Mr. Angeles as he walks away from the glass house.
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  2. #2
    Senior Member MopheadBlue's Avatar
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    Arrrgggghhhhh!! What's next?

    Why don't we just turn the country over to them?

    Everyone else seems to be trying to do just that.


  3. #3
    Senior Member greyparrot's Avatar
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    'The rabbit moving through the python in the housing industry is the growth of Latino and immigrant families,' says former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros, now chief executive of American CityVista, which targets low-income customers.
    No way! No how! Go away you FREAK!


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