Benefits all around as lenders help bilingual veterans
In fluent Spanish, Carlos Vasquez advertises his skills as a home loan officer on cable television in San Diego.
“Being able to speak their language is a real help,” said Vasquez, who learned Spanish from his Mexican parents and studied it in school and in Mexico. But “you need to know the technical side of the mortgage business to really be a help.”
The former Marine gained the technical knowledge from Welcome Home, a program designed by the nation’s mortgage bankers that provides free Internet-based job training to bilingual -- English/Spanish -- veterans.
Sponsored primarily by the Mortgage Bankers Assn. and Freddie Mac, a shareholder-owned but government-sponsored mortgage finance company, the program covers four areas of expertise: mortgage banking, loan production, loan administration, and commercial and multifamily mortgage banking. The goal: to train 1,000 bilingual mortgage-banking employees a year who can boost Latino homeownership and tap into an expanding market.
“We’re invested in increasing homeownership rates, and with the increase in the Hispanic community there is a strong demand for people who speak Spanish in the industry,” said Brook Ostrander, who manages the program for the bankers association. Other partners in the Welcome Home coalition are the Defense Department, the National Assn. of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals, Hispanic War Veterans of America, the National Puerto Rican Coalition, Puerto Rican Telephone Co. and Univision Communications.
“Our research has shown a lack of information about home-owning and mortgage finance is a barrier to Latino families,” said Patti Boerger, a spokeswoman for Freddie Mac.
That research is based in part on a study Freddie Mac funded at the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, a Latino think tank at USC. The report, released in August 2004, found “a lack of trusted sources of information is a key barrier to homeownership facing Mexican Americans and keeping hundreds of thousands of Latino families from achieving the American Dream.”
“El Sueno de su Casa [The Dream of Your Home]: The Homeownership Potential for Mexican-Heritage Families” was based on a study of the largest Latino population centers in Los Angeles, Atlanta and Houston. It recommended the creation of bilingual outreach programs, like Welcome Home, which was announced as a pilot program in September 2004.
The program initially accepted active-duty military personnel, reservists and veterans who have honorable discharges. Last September, the free training was extended to family members of those who are eligible.
This year, backers are aggressively recruiting at job fairs on military bases, such as one held in April at Camp Pendleton. There the program signed up 50 Marines and members of their families.
The training, designed by the mortgage bankers group, does not come with the guarantee of job placement. However, graduates earn certificates that make them attractive candidates for positions with the four participating lenders -- BB&T; Mortgage, CitiMortgage Inc., GMAC Mortgage Corp. and U.S. Bank Home Mortgage. So far, 10 veterans have graduated, and 328 are taking the online courses.
Vasquez, who doesn’t have a background in finance, spent December completing the classes; the work can take up to eight months to complete.
“There are a lot of home buyers or would-be home buyers in the San Diego County area,” he said. “Typically, they don’t have a down payment, so you have to look at other kinds of subprime loans that are available to them. That becomes a little complicated. Being able to ferret through that information was what I learned.”
For more information, go to www.welcomehomegi.com.
