Hispanic buyers are carrying U.S. homeownership growth. According to the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (NAHREP), Hispanic households added 441,000 net new homeowners in 2025. That is more than the country’s entire net gain, and without them the U.S. would have lost roughly 125,000 owner households.
Diana Vasquez has spent 13 years in real estate, most of them in multifamily investment sales in northern New Jersey, and founded Casa Chapulina, a bilingual nonprofit focused on real estate and financial education for Hispanic families. In her view, the momentum hides how many motivated buyers never close, especially in a high-cost, low-inventory corridor like northern New Jersey. What stops them there turns out to be more specific than high prices alone.
The most common misconception Vasquez encounters among first-time Hispanic buyers is that a mortgage pre-approval guarantees a purchase. In practice, the distance between approval and an accepted offer can be wide. A buyer might be approved for a $500,000 purchase but find that property taxes on a specific home push monthly costs beyond what they can carry. Or they may target a two-family property – common in northern New Jersey and attractive to multigenerational households – only to discover the second unit isn’t legally zoned, meaning a lender won’t count its rental income. “Just because you have an approval from the bank doesn’t mean you’re going to get the property that you want,” Vasquez says.
Then there is the competition itself. In a market with limited inventory, a single listing can draw 20 or more offers. Buyers submit bids, get rejected repeatedly, and lose momentum. Some return months later. Others pause indefinitely. Vasquez says many buyers interpret these losses as a competition problem when the deeper issue is that available properties don’t meet the specific financial and structural requirements their loans demand. “It all comes down to lack of inventory really,” she says. “But then they see it as just buyer competition and not the properties not having all the qualities that they need.”
One dynamic Vasquez works to address is the expectation among many immigrant families that a home purchase is permanent. In the U.S. market, the first purchase is typically a stepping stone – a property that builds equity and positions the buyer for something better later. That framing doesn’t come naturally to buyers whose families may have owned one home for decades in their country of origin.
Vasquez compares a first home to a first car. Someone with $5,000 doesn’t skip buying a car just because a $100,000 Mercedes is out of reach. They buy what they can afford now and trade up later. “You work your way up there,” she says. “But they don’t think of it that way.”
She points to one client who owned an aging two-family home in a neighborhood that investors and developers had begun to discover. The house had outlived its usefulness in an area now filling with new construction, and he couldn’t tell whether renovating it would be worth the cost.
Rather than hold on to the house, he sold it to an investor with Vasquez’s help. He then used the proceeds to buy both a primary residence and a three-family property, which was in better condition and had a stronger rent roll than his old home, at a lower entry price. “If you structure deals correctly, there is a lot of different ways that you can come winning in real estate,” she says.
Vasquez’s nonprofit, Casa Chapulina, grew directly out of a recurring problem she encountered as a broker: Spanish-speaking clients who could not read or fully understand the documents they were being asked to sign. The organization has translated the full range of transaction documents into Spanish – with a disclaimer that the translations are educational, not legally binding – so that buyers and sellers can at least comprehend what they’re agreeing to before signing.
The need became clear after a specific incident. A client asked Vasquez for contracts in Spanish. When told they didn’t exist, the client became so scared by the possibility of being taken advantage of that she decided not to sell. “She was so frightened that someone was going to do something malicious to her that she took the house off the market,” Vasquez says.
Fear, in Vasquez’s experience, is the most reliable deal killer. She describes a family that entered contract on a property just before pandemic-era disruption. Uncertainty led them to back out. Rates subsequently dropped – a change they could have captured had they stayed in contract – and the property’s value jumped by $100,000. By the time they reconsidered, prices had risen beyond their reach. Vasquez had several other clients who made the same mistake by holding out for rates to come back down. They never bought, she says, and the roughly $400,000 homes within their reach back then no longer exist in their market.
Banking conventions create another friction point. Vasquez notes that immigrant families frequently keep savings in cash rather than in bank accounts. Lenders, however, require funds to be seasoned, or deposited in a bank account for a documented period, before buyers can use them in a transaction. Vasquez says she has had to explain that requirement to clients many times, and the reason behind it often comes as news to them.
These conversations about cash seasoning, zoning requirements, and tax implications need to happen before a buyer starts looking at homes, according to Vasquez – not after an offer falls apart. When Casa Chapulina’s educational programs reach buyers first, they arrive at an agent’s office already familiar with the basics. Vasquez says the difference is immediate: instead of confusion and distrust during the process, buyers recognize concepts they’ve already encountered.
Educated buyers still need professionals who won’t rush them, and Vasquez’s advice to agents and loan officers who want to serve this market is to stop treating clients as sales targets. Buyers want to feel that they’re making the decision themselves, on their own timeline, once they understand what they’re agreeing to. Pressure undercuts that, even when the agent means well. Agents should still follow up and stay in touch, she says, but the relationship has to rest on information rather than persuasion. “Just be a source of knowledge and help people,” she says. “That’s how people are going to get to trust you.”
That patience will matter even more for the next group of clients Vasquez sees coming: aging Hispanic homeowners in their seventies and older. Many will eventually leave homes that have grown too large for them, and some have children who live elsewhere and have no interest in inheriting the property. “That is a community that’s going to need a lot of help,” Vasquez says. “But you’re going to have to have a lot of patience.”
About the Expert: Diana Vasquez is the founder of DV Equities Group and Casa Chapulina, a bilingual nonprofit providing real estate and financial literacy education for the Hispanic community in northern New Jersey.
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