“At this point it’s so ridiculous,” said Carrasco, a 16-year veteran real estate agent with Intero Real Estate Services in San Jose. “For each property, we have 20 offers.”

About 60% of Carrasco’s customers are Latino. They range from millennial first-time buyers and long-time renters to families upgrading starter homes or looking for new investment properties. Together, they represent the fastest growing segment of the home buying markets in the United States and California, according to two new reports from the Urban Institute and the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals.

But the story is more complicated in the Bay Area, where Latin American homeownership declined 6% between 2010 and 2019, according to an analysis of census data by the progressive advocacy group California Forward.

While the Bay Area has lost Latino homeowners, California is set to gain 6.7 million more by 2040, according to the Urban Institute, even as overall home ownership rates the property goes down. The question is whether the losses of coastal Bay Area towns will continue to fuel gains in outlying regions, and whether the next generation will be hampered by familiar financial barriers or realize a new economic power.

“Latino landlords are 40 times the wealth of Latin American tenants,” said Noerena Limón, senior vice president of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals. This makes buying a home a crucial tool in finding financial stability and bridging racial wealth gaps, she said, but it “becomes a problem when there aren’t enough homes.” to buy”.

Realtors and lenders say some longtime Latin American homeowners are seizing the moment to sell their Bay Area homes and move to low-cost emerging markets like Houston, Phoenix or Boise, Idaho. As extended suburbs like Tracy, Gilroy, and Brentwood become more unaffordable, others are considering more remote locations like Modesto, Los Banos, and Madera.

For those still leaving their jobs technically in San Francisco or San Jose, the uncertain future of super shuttles can be another daunting prospect. And even on the fringes of the Bay Area, winning bidding wars increasingly means sacrificing buyer protection, which adds financial risk.

“Buyers are blindly accepting properties as is,” said Lupe Silva, a former Apple software engineer who now heads Silva Real Estate Group in San Jose. “It has become so difficult even for regions like Manteca and Modesto.”

Federal mortgage data shows that potential Latino, black and Indigenous home buyers still receive fewer home loans than white Californians, according to a report released last year by the Oakland nonprofit for social justice, the Greenlining Institute. The disparity can be magnified by risky deals like no-contingency real estate deals, Silva said, where buyers may have to find thousands of dollars to cover unexpected repairs or low real estate appraisals.

The lack of up-to-date and detailed local data makes it difficult to accurately assess how many people from different demographic groups are on the move during the pandemic. For small rural counties, it is particularly difficult to find accurate estimates from the recent census of Latin American homeownership, although areas like Fresno appear to be growing. Personal motivations are also driving the market, such as the higher rates of multigenerational households of Latinos.

“Family, or family, is so central to culture,” said Limón. “Much of what happened during COVID, for all families, was the need for four secure walls.”

On a recent afternoon in the eastern suburb of Contra Costa County in Brentwood, Elizabeth Olivera juggled a baby and a furniture delivery to her new five-bedroom, three-bathroom home. “Quieren ayuda? (“Do you want help?”) She yelled at the movers.

Buying a bigger house in a better neighborhood suddenly became much more important to Olivera, 30, when she hit the COVID trio of losing a job, planning a wedding and losing preparing a baby. Carrasco, the real estate agent, helped her navigate a barrage of offers to sell the two-bedroom, one-bathroom San Leandro house, which Olivera’s father left when she died and then used the money to get the $ 655,000 house in Brentwood.

But that wasn’t until the self-proclaimed city dweller struck a deal with her husband, who wanted more space to accommodate a family visiting from Mexico: “If you want to move to the suburbs,” Olivera tells her, “ i need a swimming pool. “

She had the pool. More importantly, they got better funding for the new house and Olivera is a 15-minute drive to her new healthcare job in Antioch.

“When I left my father’s house for the first time, I cried,” Olivera said, though the shock has faded since the baby’s arrival. “I never – never – thought in my life that I would have a house like this.

For new Latin American buyers who don’t have another home to sell, a growing number of banks and nonprofits are offering financial assistance and loan programs. Beginning in January, beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration program, or DACA, are eligible for federally guaranteed mortgages. More and more lenders are also approving immigrants with a federal tax identification number instead of a Social Security number, said Eric Becerra, regional manager of the Fresno office of Cardinal Financial Co.

“You have people who may have been in the shadows before,” Becerra said. This is another factor – with lower prices and family friendly floor plans – contributing to a “perfect storm” of demand for homes in the Central Valley.

For Carrasco, the current high price of admission is an obstacle that can be overcome. In Santa Clara County, where she lives, the median home price has climbed to $ 1.3 million, compared to a Latin American median household income of around $ 80,000. Buy a home further away now when mortgage rates are low, she says, and you can always come back to town later.

The persistence required today reminds her of the path she forged after moving to the United States from her home state of Durango, Mexico, long before she had her own Carrasco team selling millions of dollars in. properties every year. Almost two decades ago, she started out as an assistant earning $ 12 an hour in San Jose.

“Back then, the houses cost $ 600,000,” she says. “Now it’s not even a condo.”

Lauren Hepler is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @LAHepler