The Latino Market: ‘I Noticed a Need’

When Ernesto Diaz was 6, he and his nine brothers and sisters made their way with their parents from Durango, Mexico, to the border towns of Mexicali and Tijuana to work and obtain the legal papers they needed to enter the United States.

By 1960, they had gotten legal clearance to immigrate to Southern California, but they quickly faced a new challenge.

“With 12 people in the family, nobody wanted to rent to my parents, so we had to buy a house,” Diaz recalled. “We gathered every little penny we could. I even contributed what I earned from my paper route.”

It took the family six years of scrimping and saving--and living in a cramped two-bedroom rental house in Rosemead (some family members slept in the garage)--before they were able to buy a small house in Alhambra.

With that kind of background, Diaz, now 41, can relate perfectly to the customers of his Century 21 Casablanca Realtors office in the city of Commerce.

More than half of the buyers and sellers Diaz works with are Mexican-born and the majority of the others hail from Peru, El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, Chile and Colombia.

“I specifically targeted that group, because I’m Spanish-speaking myself and I noticed a need for a good, solid professional real estate company to serve the immigrant population,” Diaz said.

The Century 21 Casablanca office opened in Maywood in 1989 and moved to Commerce in 1991. Despite the housing slump of the ‘90s and the prolonged recession in California’s economy, Casablanca was among the leaders in sales of all of Century 21’s 6,000 offices nationwide last year, mostly because of a surge in Latino home buying.

John Tuccillo, vice president and chief economist of the National Assn. of Realtors, said that easier access to mortgage money has driven some of the boom, particularly for Latinos who have taken advantage of a recent push by lenders to offer mortgages with down payments of 5% or less.

“Latinos are typically buying property all across Southern California, concentrating on the low-end starter homes,” said Dowell Myers, an associate professor of urban planning at USC and an expert on demographic trends in housing. “It’s good for the economy, because they’re firming up the bottom of the market.”

Nearly all of Diaz’s 80 agents are bilingual, with most speaking Spanish but others fluent in Korean, Chinese and even a couple of African languages. Diaz advertises primarily in the Spanish-language media.

He has designed the atmosphere at Casablanca Realtors to appeal to immigrants.

His receptionist answers the phone in Spanish and while callers are on hold, they hear a taped advertising message in Spanish playing over soft music. Casablanca real estate agents, the ad assures callers, will make the murky world of real estate “as clear as pure water.”

Diaz often faces the task of clearing up misconceptions, fears and worries that plague his customers. Many immigrants either do not trust or are so intimidated by U.S. banks that they do not use them and so they do not have credit records or checking and savings accounts.

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When it comes time to buy a home, many show up with fists full of “mattress money.” In years past, lenders often disallowed such assets in evaluating loans, Diaz said. But recently, a number of lenders have realized that simple distrust of or unfamiliarity with banks is what drives the saver to put the money under the mattress or, more likely, to bury it in a sealed coffee can in the backyard in the dead of night.

Another difficulty of working with Latino immigrants, Diaz said, is that one sale is often all an agent will make to a family. “They don’t tend to move, they stay in the same place once they get settled there. They are very root-conscious, and once they get used to a place it’s hard for them to leave,” he said.

Witness Diaz’s own family. That little bungalow his parents and their brood of a dozen moved into 28 years ago? His parents still live there, not with children now but with 24 grandchildren who visit and two who live there full time.